Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Chapter 26

“From out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may beat me flat.”

Drake’s memory of the final minute was clear and vivid. He had been standing at the ship’s port, gazing down on a world below. It was almost one full day since he had been embodied, and now he was ready to board a lander and begin the descent.

He already knew the planet and the local skyscape. A wealth of information about both had been loaded into him during embodiment. But that was abstract knowledge. Now he desired the real thing: the feel of alien soil or sand beneath his clawed feet, the first breath of whatever passed for air, the sight of sun and moons and starry constellations diffused through haze and cloud and nighttime mist.

He took a last look down. The world was close to Earth type, and his embodiment reflected that: arms and legs and neckless head; three-fingered hands; a body able to walk upright rather than crawl or burrow or scuttle across a rocky seabed.

He turned to enter the lander, and in that moment the ship’s control system spoke: “Shiva presence detected. Landing aborted. Caesura activated. Final entry commences in five seconds.”

So soon? The ship’s message had just told him that he was going to die. He had expected a long and lonely vigil on the surface, with only memories of Ana to sustain him, and at the end of it the arrival of a Shiva influence and an unknown destiny. Instead he would find oblivion within the next few seconds.

Since there was not one thing he could do about it, Drake stood perfectly still, watched, and listened. The caesura had already appeared. He could see a roiling spiral of darkness with a blacker eye at the center. A caesura was a slit in space-time, but this seemed more like a bottomless funnel, a conical swirl of ink and dark oil.

The ship was poised on the brink. Drake, knowing that his final moment of consciousness had arrived, thought of Ana. Now he would never see her again.

He squeezed his eyes shut…

…and opened them. There had been a violent moment of disorientation in which his fractionated body twisted and spun in a hundred directions at once. But when that ended, he was still alive. All was calm. The port beside him showed no chaos, no blazing glare or stygian dark, nothing but peaceful stars.

Had the Shiva prevented the caesura from operating?

“What went wrong? Why didn’t it work?”

Before he could struggle for his own answers to those questions, the ship was replying: “Nothing is wrong. Everything has proceeded exactly consistent with theory. ”

“Do you know what happened?” Of all improbabilities, this was the greatest: that Drake and the ship had been flung to

another universe looking exactly like their own. He stared again out of the port. The sky showed stars, gas clouds, and the faint misty patches of spiral nebulae. But the stars were in unfamiliar patterns, and the planet had vanished entirely. “Where are we?”

“Specifically ? I do not know.”

“The caesura was supposed to annihilate us — to throw us into another universe. This looks like our universe.”

“It is our universe. I have estimated the local physical constants, and they are the same within the limits of measurement. The probability of this occurring in another universe is vanishingly small. I am now in the process of measuring the global universe parameters.”

“Do you know what has happened to us?”

“I have no proof, but on the basis of deductive logic I can make a strong inference. The operation of the caesuras follows an unpredictable statistical pattern, thus the outcome of any specific use cannot be predicted. But the probabilities have long been known. In almost every case, the caesura serves to eject an object that enters it into another universe. Once in a million uses, the caesura serves as an instantaneous transportation device to a chosen location. And sometimes, so rarely that we had assumed it would never happen in practice, the caesura may transport an object to an unknown place and time within our own universe. The evidence indicates that has happened to us. According to the records, this possible outcome was explained to you long ago. ”

Drake remembered it — vaguely. It had been mentioned when the idea of using caesuras first came up; then he had ignored it, thinking of the caesuras only as weapons. But the Bose-Einstein Condensate that formed the ship’s cooled brain forgot nothing, and its atomic lattice memory held millions of times as much information as all of Earth’s old storage systems combined. The ship probably knew everything that Drake had ever been told, as a tiny subset of its database.

He regarded the stars outside with a new eye. “We are still in our own universe, but far away from where we started. Is it possible for you to take me back to headquarters? ”

“It may be possible, eventually. It cannot be done quickly, for several reasons. First, this vessel is able to travel only at subluminal velocities. Extended travel must necessarily be slow. Second, the caesura can cause translation through both time and space. We are now within a galaxy older than the one that we left. That also suggests the passage of considerable time.”

“What do you mean, considerable?”

“I have not yet determined that. It could be many billions of years. I will know better when I have completed my estimate of the universe’s global constants. Third, I have already sought to detect evidence of superluminal signals. I find nothing above threshold. Therefore, we cannot be anywhere within our original galaxy, or else S-wave communication has been replaced by something else. Finally, I do not recognize any galactic spatial patterns, as I would if we were somewhere within the local galactic supergroup. We have traveled, at a minimum, hundreds of millions of light-years. The problem of discovering the location of our galaxy is formidable. Even if that were solved, the problem of reaching it would remain. ”

A ship’s brain was designed to be free of emotional circuits, including any trace of humor or fear. Now Drake wished it were otherwise. He could use support at the moment from Tom Lambert or Par Leon. But the ship’s design was his own doing. He had not wanted others to be forced to face their own extinction, and perhaps to flinch. He was less lucky. He had emotion aplenty and enough intelligence to understand the implications of what he had just been told.

He stared down at his body, never used for its original purpose and now useless. It had been enhanced for what seemed a more than adequate life expectancy, at least a million years. For any point within his own galaxy that would have been more than enough. He could have endured until contact was established with other humanity or until an S-wave signal facility was reached.

Movement to the galactic scale changed everything. The home galaxy contained about a hundred billion stars, all packed within a flat disk a hundred thousand light-years across. The whole universe contained a hundred billion similar galaxies. The tiny misty patches he could see outside the ship faded to invisibility across more than twelve billion light-years. Each was an island of suns, from the densely packed galactic center to the fading edge of the outermost spiral rim.

Somewhere, far out there, his own galaxy endured. The desperate struggle to contain the Shiva continued. The suffering and terror of trillions of sentient beings were reduced by distance to a silent and ethereal dust mote of light.

He wondered what was happening now. Were other copies of him, in other ships, at last making progress against the Shiva? Were the Shiva sweeping on, unstoppable, across the whole galactic disk? He would never find out. Even if he knew his destination and could head for home at once, his body would wear out and die before he had traveled a tiny fraction of the journey.

And if the search for the home galaxy had to proceed at random? Then a searcher would still be wandering through space thirty or forty billion years in the future, when the universe collapsed toward its inexorable endpoint of infinite pressure and temperature. That searcher could not be Drake or this ship. Long before the end, in less than an eye blink on the cosmic scale, they would be dust.

It was a moment for despair. The logical thing was to end it now, before continued existence brought more grief and longing. He was looking down at his new, flawless, smooth-skinned body, wondering how it could most easily be given a peaceful end, when the ship spoke again:

“My defined actions did not extend beyond the point of entry into the caesura. I require new instructions. Can you tell me the nature of our future, and what activities you plan?”

A moment for despair. That much was permitted. Now it must be over. Someone depended on him — even if it was only a ship. He could not give up.

“You know the main criteria for stellar type and planetary orbits that encourage the development of life. Do you have instruments to determine the nearest and most promising stars that satisfy those criteria?”

“Certainly.”

“What about the development of intelligent life?”

“Essentially unpredictable. I can make crude estimates, but with little confidence in the results. The ascent of a native intelligence depends on too many random events in the evolutionary process.”

“That’s what I was afraid you’d say. All right, I want a systematic survey and catalog of all stars in this galaxy likely to have developed life. Throw in your best guesses for the development of intelligence. Give each one a probability, and place them in order of our distance from them.”

“That can be done.”

“Another question: What is the programmed lifetime of this ship?”

“Given raw materials, it is indefinite. I contain instructions for repair, for maintenance, and if necessary for self-replication. My memory has quadruple redundancy to allow for quantum changes. As any component ages, it can be renewed. ”

“How about me? I know there’s a lab on board that can build a body to specification and download a person into it, because that’s what you did to make me as I am. Is the lab still working?”

“It is working now. Since it is a part of me, it should continue to do so for the indefinite future.”

“What about the other way around?” Drake, despite his determination to think positive, felt a tension he could not ignore. This was the key question. “Could you take me as I am now, and upload me from this body into electronic storage? And if you did that, could you download me later into another body, either the same or a different one? And could you do the same thing over and over?”

The pause seemed long, though it was probably no more than a second.

“What you ask was not in the original mission plan, but it seems completely feasible. The body for future download would need to be specified. Also, I could not go beyond two hundred embodiments without replenishment. If more were necessary I would require a planetary visit for the acquisition of more raw materials.”

“I’m planning on planetary visits. In fact, I’m depending on them.” Drake went again to the ship’s port and stared out. The nearby stars were the brightest things he saw, but they were like cells in a human body, tiny subcomponents of a larger whole. The power was in the galaxies, stretching out into space forever. “What’s the average distance between galaxies, and how far away is the nearest one?”

“Galaxies average a little more than 4,300,000 light-years apart. Of course, they are not homogeneously distributed. ”

“Of course.” The ship did not catch irony, but maybe it could be taught. Certainly, they would have time enough.

“And the nearest galaxy to this one is about seven million light-years.”

Seven lifetimes for this body. But long before that he would go crazy. The only way to survive was to spend the time between stellar encounters dormant, in electronic storage. And the next time around he would insist on his familiar human form.

“There is another factor that I should mention. When you asked me the mean distance between galaxies, I gave you an answer that applies today. ”

“That’s what I expected.”

“But if, as your other questions would suggest, you plan on searching for our galaxy of origin, another factor must be considered. The universe is expanding. The distance between the galaxies constantly increases. If our target world lies many billions of light-years away, then the rate at which it flies from us will be a substantial fraction of light speed. Our effective rate of travel toward it would be diminished. Perhaps greatly diminished.”

“I see the problem; the Red Queen’s race.” Drake was feeling dangerously unstable. “All right. What can’t be cured must be endured. How long before you can pick a preferred stellar target?”

“That has already been done.”

“With life, or with intelligent life?”

“Both tables have been prepared. As I said earlier, little confidence can be given for anything involving the development of intelligence.”

“We’ll have to take that chance. Consider only systems with a better than ninety-five percent chance of having life, and a better than ten percent chance of having intelligent life. How many are there?”

“Between 120 and 250. It is hard to be more precise.”

“How far to the nearest candidate?”

“Six thousand light-years.”

“Take us there. And one other thing. You said you could not detect any sign of S-wave signals. Is that because they travel only a finite distance?”

“No. In principle, they have infinite range. In practice they follow an inverse square law between source and receiver. With the ship’s on-board detection equipment, the signals become indistinguishable from background at no more than a few tens of thousands of light-years. That is adequate for signaling within a galaxy but not outside it. However, even the strongest and most tightly focused S-wave beam would be lost to our limited equipment within a hundred million light-years. That is why I am confident that we are nowhere within our original local supergroup.”

“But you could do better with a better receiver. Do you know how to make one?”

“I have the specifications for much larger receivers — for receivers of almost unlimited size, that would be able to pick up superluminal signals from the far depths of space. However, their fabrication could not be done on board. It would call for a free-space facility, and much assistance.”

“Don’t worry about that for the moment.”

Six thousand light-years to the nearest prospect. Seven million light-years to the next galaxy. One step at a time. There were endless billions of years ahead of them, time enough for anything.

“I now have other information, and it amplifies my earlier statements. I have completed my estimate of global universe parameters. In particular, I have measured the galactic red shift. The result of that is surprising: There is no longer any red shift of distant galaxies.”

The ship paused. Drake was learning how its analytical processes operated. He waited.

“Assuming that we are still in the same universe, which I continue to believe, the vanishing of the red shift is highly

significant. It means that the universe is halfway through its total lifetime, and the blue shift phase is beginning. Within the limits of observational error, my best estimates of current epoch show that the initial singularity preceding the expansion occurred thirty-three billion years ago. The final singularity, the eschaton itself, lies thirty-two billion years in the future. ”

Not endless billions of years ahead, then, but thirty-two billion. At that final point lay the Omega Point, the ultimate last hope for Ana’s resurrection. Except that Drake did not want to wait that long. And he was busy with his own calculation.

“We’ve jumped ahead eight billion years!”

“It is closer to nine billion.”

Eight billion, nine billion, thirty-two billion — Drake found the numbers too big to have any meaning. One step at a time. “You asked about the nature of our future activities. I can tell you them. After we have finished speaking, I am to be uploaded to electronic storage — painlessly, please, if there’s a way to do it. You will proceed to the chosen star system. Upon arrival there, you will make observations of life-bearing planets. If one of them offers evidence of an intelligent life-form with a working technology base, resurrect me. If not, select the next promising stellar target and continue the journey. Carry out the same procedures when you arrive there. If there is no intelligence or intelligence without technology, keep looking. Awaken me only for discovery of technological intelligence, or for an emergency that you are unable to deal with. Is all that clear?”

“You have left one important point unspecified. You order me to resurrect you when we reach a world that satisfies your criteria, but you have not specified a form for your embodiment. ”

“True.” Drake abandoned, reluctantly, his plan to spend the rest of the future in his old human form. “Give me a body that can survive on the planet. Better still, make it the same body shape as that of the intelligent life-form.”

“What if there should happen to be more than one?”

“Give me the form of the one that seems closest to human.” Drake regarded his body, so soon assumed and so soon to be abandoned. Was there a reason to remain in it any longer? Not that he could think of. It would be another six thousand years — at an absolute minimum — before he had any reason to be conscious. He must not dwell on that. Think of it as a natural sleep/wake cycle, not as a time comprising the whole of written history before his own birth. “I’m ready to be uploaded. If you can’t make up your mind which form to use when you get there, because they’re not anything like human, don’t worry about it. Just pick one.”

“With what criteria?”

“I don’t mind. Use a virtual coin if you have to — but don’t wake me up to call the toss.”

Chapter 27 Postindustrial

Drake awoke slowly and easily. As soon as he was able to think, he knew that something had gone badly awry.

His body did not feel wrong — it felt too right. His blood ran like ichor through his veins, and his mood was giddily euphoric. He knew of only one way that such a thing could happen.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head, and looked down at his naked body. As he had suspected; he was in his own human form, a new and blemish-free version of himself. He was also aboard the ship.

“What happened?” The vocal cords had never been used before, but they were in perfect working order. He tried an experimental laugh. Whatever else might be wrong, the embodiment lab was in fine shape. And so was he. “Are you telling me that you found a planet full of humans who look just like me in another galaxy?”

“No. I believe that we have encountered an intelligent form, but it is certainly not human.”

“So why did you put me in this body?”

“It was a default option.”

The ship sounded as frustrated as Drake felt exhilarated. He needed to be careful. The brain transients produced by new-body residence had not yet damped themselves out. He could feel the wild mood swings. How long had he been dormant?

“What do you mean, a ‘default option’? Tell me what’s going on.”

“Your instructions were followed to the letter. We flew to our first target star. One of its planets bore life, but it had not progressed beyond single-celled prokaryotes. There is no possibility that intelligence will develop there for several billion years. I therefore proceeded to the second target, twelve thousand light-years away. I could determine, from a distance of half a light-year, that the nature of the atmosphere of all the planets in the system was such that no life in any form that we know it could survive. Nonetheless, I continued and found on closer approach that life had actually come and gone on one world. It had never achieved intelligence, and it had died out as temperatures rose during the normal brightening and expansion of its main sequence primary.

“On the third world, fifteen thousand light-years away, there were large artifacts and all the signs of sometime intelligence. But the creators had been destroyed, apparently by their own actions. No other life-form had the potential for near-term self-awareness.

“On the fourth world—”

“Wait a minute. How many targets have we visited?”

“This is the one hundred and twenty-fourth. I saw no point in resurrecting you on any earlier occasion. You are not interested in extinct intelligence, nor in possible future intelligence, but in present intelligence. We have never before found evidence of that.”

“And now you have?”

“I believe so.”

“And how long since the search began?”

“We have been traveling for slightly more than two million years.”

“Fine.” Drake decided that he had become blasй. Two million years no longer impressed him. To get his attention now, you had to talk billions. “So what’s the problem?”

“When we were approaching the current target star, I examined it from far orbit and concluded that one of the planets was remarkably Earth-like. Its atmosphere told of the presence of oxygen-breathing life, and as we came closer I observed several characteristic markers of intelligence: long linear and rectangular surface features, modified river courses, patterns of nighttime lights, and cluster patterns supporting little or no plant life.”

“That sounds right. Roads and dams and power and cities. Did you make detail scans?”

“I did so as we approached closer, images to the meter level of detail and beyond. ”

“So you know the shape of whoever was doing all the work. Why didn’t you put me into that form?”

“Had I been able to find such a form, I would have done so. As it is, I found it necessary to invoke the default option of your original shape for the embodiment.” The wall in front of Drake became a display screen. “Observe. We are first looking from far away, on our approach orbit.”

The scene was the whole planet, seen from space. The ball glowed a mottled red and pink, from its banded midsection up to the small circles of white around the poles.

“Are those water-ice polar caps?” Drake had the irrelevant thought that he was looking at a gigantic Christmas tree ornament. He was bubbling over with excess energy, and his mind was ready to accept strange images.

“Correct. The mean temperature is that of Earth during one of your planet’s warmer periods.”

“I can’t see much from this distance.”

“Have patience. The images that you will soon see derive from lower orbit.”

The pink sphere on the display was growing. It was possible to imagine dark lines on its surface, scattered close to the equator. Drake waited. He knew the tendency of the human eye to play “connect the dots” and discern linear patterns where there were none. His thoughts spun away to the far-off past. Who was it, long before his own time, who had been fooled by that built-in physiological quirk of the human brain and had drawn maps of nonexistent Martian “canals”?

Except that this was no optical illusion. The linear features were real, growing in clarity every minute. As the ship drew closer to the planet, the display could no longer hold the full image of the world. The focus moved to a line, dark and straight, at center screen. It was bordered by colored rectangles and triangles. To Drake’s eye and imagination the line was a road across a Kansas flatland. The broad fields were different shades of red, a child’s quilt with bright patches that ranged from light pink to deepest crimson. The yellow brick road had turned dark brown, but it ran through farmlands of fairy-tale color.

The scale that accompanied the display gave the lie to the illusion. The “road” was a kilometer wide. The quilt was monstrous, each of its patches the size of a county of old Earth. Scattered darker dots within the patches were big enough to be towns.

The field of view zoomed in toward a narrower black thread at the center of the broad swath of road. Drake could see that the edges of the patchwork quilt were not regular. They were broken and random, the boundaries intruding on each other. The pink had spread in places onto the darker swath, like crabgrass invading an untended lawn.

The black thread must surely be water. Unlike on Mars, these canals were real. The line of banks ran ruler straight across the surface. Close to the water’s edge, every few kilometers, a five-sided open tower of girders stretched toward the sky. The display closed in on one.

“This is too tall to be built on this planet with natural materials. Carbon composites are essential for its building and continued stability, which implies a reasonably advanced technology. Technology implies intelligence. But where is that intelligence?”

Drake recalled his “firebreak,” the millions of human worlds sacrificed and emptied to escape the Shiva. Had other galaxies been invaded? Were alien species trying the same delaying tactic, abandoning this world to slow an enemy’s advance? Who was the Roman general famous for his scorched-earth policy and refusal to fight the Carthaginians directly?

“One might conclude that the intelligence is here.”

The display homed in on a lighter-colored area by the canal. It was a clearing, a couple of hundred meters across, and it stood in the shadow of one of the great pentagonal structures. Drake was at last able to pick out surface life-forms.

The flat semicircle was bordered on its straight edge by water, and on its curved perimeter by a skimpy fence. A group of thirty or forty objects like oversized pink snails clustered against the boundary. They were creeping steadily along the fence. A dozen others, slightly smaller and faster moving, surrounded them.

A group of twenty other beings crouched close to the water’s edge. They were dark red, with many legs, and they surrounded a dark, shallow pit in the surface. On closer inspection Drake could see that they came in three types. The ones on the very edge of the pit were the biggest, four times the size of the outermost group members.

“This depressed area” — a bright point of green, vivid against the pinks and browns, appeared on the display in the middle of the pit — “is revealed by infrared imaging to be well above ambient temperature. I assume that it is a breeding pit, kept warm by rotting vegetation. It is not hot enough to be a cooking pit.”

Drake thought that was an odd thing for the ship to say — the presence of the vast pentagonal towers spoke of a mastery of technology far beyond the use of fire. But he could see (or imagine) a consistent picture in what was going on in the clearing: herd animals, grazing, held by the fence and protected and chivied along by the equivalent of sheepdogs. The red creatures might be the breeding phase of either of the other types.

But where was the intelligence that had made the great towers? A primitive breeding/grazing society as he knew it could never produce such a technological tour de force.

“This settlement seems typical.” The display scanned along the canal to show numerous colonies, each one close to a

tower. “The pattern is repeated in hundreds of places. Each time, the same organisms are seen. But now — observe.”

One of the towers had toppled over. It sprawled the skeleton of its length across the canal and far beyond, into the patchwork of open fields. It seemed intact after its collapse, vouching for the strength of the materials used to make it.

“There is no colony here. Every other tower has one. And see this.”

The scene on the display was moving again, swinging away from the canal to a spider’s web of converging roads. At the web center stood buildings, some low and dark roofed, others reaching for heaven like the pentagonal towers. Plants like long vines grew over the low roofs or wound around the towers’ bottom girders. There was no sign of life anywhere.

“Buildings. Roads. Power stations. Lighted cities. Communications, unless the towers serve some other uses. There is civilization. But where are the beings who did all this ? I would welcome your interpretation, before I offer mine.”

“I can’t even make a guess. Did you see signs of life or artifacts on any other planet of this system?”

“None.”

“So they don’t have spaceflight. Their development must have been enormously different from ours. What do you think is happening?”

“I have one piece of evidence that you have not yet seen. This is an image taken at night.”

The bright cities stood out like clusters of jewels. The roads that joined them were invisible, but as Drake watched, lines of bright blue intermittently flashed along their lengths.

“I have enhanced the pulse in duration and lowered its apparent speed to a level where human eyes can follow. What you are seeing is a burst of information carried by optical laser. Given the absence of intelligent organic life, it suggests a simple explanation: This civilization has passed the industrial phase. It is now wholly concerned with information transfer among its separate elements. Physical transfer of material is no longer necessary.”

“What about the beings who did the original development?”

“I assume that they went to inorganic form and were downloaded into a planetary network.”

“One that takes no notice of us?”

“If they never discovered spaceflight, they may deny even the possibility of off-world existence. The question is, What do we do now? We need a working force to build an S-wave signal detector, but the intelligence of this planet has never worked in space. Also, like my own intelligence, it may be unable to appear in corporeal form. How can we determine if that is so?”

“Since they don’t respond to our signals, I’ll have to go down and take a look. Chances are there’s nothing useful, but if this is the best you’ve seen in a hundred and twenty-four tries, we have to make sure.”

“Not the best one. The only one.”

“How many more hours of daylight?”

“Unless we elect to change longitude, there will be six hours before darkness.”

Drake glanced at the sun, uncannily close in color to Sol. “I might be back by then. If not, I’ll spend the night in the lander. Is it ready for use?”

“It is waiting.”

“How much will you have to change me, before I can survive on the surface?”

“Some slight changes were made during your embodiment. This world is close to being an Earth look-alike. I would recommend, however, that you proceed with caution in ingesting native substances.”

“Don’t eat the food and don’t drink the water. Sure. What else?”

“I believe no other changes are essential. ”

“You knew what I was going to decide, didn’t you?”

“I had suspicions.”

Drake wondered what the ship had been doing during the two million years in which he was dormant. Studying him, more than likely. Was there any way that a ship’s brain could become smarter, or at least more cunning, over time? If experience worked for people, might it work for inorganic brains?

“You know what to do if I don’t return, and the signals from me stop?”

“Regrettably, if you do not return I will be able to do nothing to help you. If you do not send instructions, I will wait for one year in orbit around this planet. Then the ship will go on to the next target star and continue the search. I will seek to recover the lander, if that is in any way possible.”

Drake nodded. Nothing about recovering his body. There was only one lander. Whereas he …

He was completely expendable. If he came back, the Drake Merlin held in the ship’s storage would be updated to reflect his experiences. On his next embodiment he would feel full continuity of consciousness.

If he didn’t come back, a copy of him would still exist on board the ship. His next embodiment, at some new target world, would feel exactly as he felt: like the one and only real Drake Merlin. He would experience continuity of consciousness, although he would have no memory of a visit to this system.

Drake had a stranger thought yet. Another copy of him, or a hundred others, could be made at any time. Right now, he could ask for duplicates. Why not go down there with someone he could totally rely on — himself?

He sighed. He had too much adrenaline in his system. The sooner that he worked it off, the better.

“All right. I’m ready for the lander.”

Drake had in his augmented memory a working knowledge of all known languages, visual, aural, tactile, and pheromonal.

How useful were they likely to be? He was not optimistic as the pinnace completed its braking phase and floated toward a landing a few kilometers west of one of the settlements. It was easy to be fooled by a planet superficially like Earth, but he might be ten billion light-years away. Every life-form in his native galaxy could be a close cousin compared with this.

He put the lander down on an open field at the edge of one of the deserted “towns.” There was life here, but the forms were small and they scurried away before he could take a good look at them. Drake estimated that the biggest of the leggy red animals that they had observed by the canal was maybe a quarter of his size. He was the planet’s giant.

He stepped down from the lander. A faint breeze on his face carried a scent that made him wrinkle his nose. It reminded him of pickled onions, and that in turn suggested concert recitals in Germany, followed by dark beer and laughter and late-night suppers. How long since anything had summoned up those memories?

He moved onto the road and knelt down to examine the surface.

“Are you getting all this?” Whatever he registered with his senses or his instruments should be automatically sent to the ship, hovering in stationary orbit.

“Everything. Continue.”

“Just testing.”

Drake probed the surface. The road was a fine glasslike gravel set in a tough bituminous matrix. It was tough and durable, but fine threads of bright red vegetation had taken a toehold at the edge. A narrow strip along the middle of the road was brighter than the rest, as though something continuously scoured it clean.

“This hasn’t been used as a road for a long time. I think you may have it exactly right. They’ve advanced to pure electronic form and left material things behind. They didn’t restore the fallen tower, because they no longer need it.” Drake glanced at the sun. It was lower in the sky, and barred clouds were moving in across it. “If there’s any sign of them, it ought to be in the towns.”

“Two hours to sunset.” The ship had noticed and interpreted his action. “The town that you are about to enter did not

show up on our orbital survey as one with nighttime lighting. There are rainclouds approaching from the west. I may lose the ability to monitor your environment visually. If you intend a detailed exploration, you should stay in the lander and wait for morning. ”

“It’s only a few minutes’ walk. I’ll take a quick look, and then come back to the lander for the night.”

The two towers in the middle of the town were no more than a small fraction of the height of their counterparts by the canal, but as the sun went down they cast long shadows in Drake’s direction. They were taller than he had thought, a hundred meters and more. The bigger one was in the exact center of the town. Drake walked toward it across a skeletal pattern of girder shadows on the dark road.

“I’m at the first building. Plants are growing around the walls, but they don’t stop there. I can see vines entering through that break.”

He pointed to a gap in the building wall. The semicircular arch was six feet tall and came down to within a foot or so of ground level. It ended in a flat ledge about four feet wide. He could easily enter if he were willing to step on the vines.

“What are the chances that touching the plants will hurt me?”

“Possible, but unlikely unless they are motion sensitive. They are chemically different enough that they will not respond to you as a living form. Warning: Within the next ten minutes there will be enough cloud cover to inhibit my visual oversight of you.”

Drake poked his head through the opening. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He was looking into a small room, with another semicircular aperture at the far side. Dusky pink plant life covered everything like a carpet. Beyond the other opening he could see a downward ramp and, beside it, the faint outline of what looked like a piece of gray machinery.

He lifted his feet to avoid touching the plants and steadied himself with his hand on the side of the opening. A surface layer of wall material, about a quarter of an inch thick, crumbled to white powder at his touch. The dust made him sneeze. The wall behind was revealed as a solid metallic plate.

At the same moment his communications unit produced a staccato rattle. A diminished ship’s voice said urgently but faintly, “Your signal is weakening. ”

Drake pulled back. “Is it active interference?”

“I think not. It is a natural fading. There must be some shield or insulation in the building walls and roof. I am predicting rain where you are located within the next quarter of an hour.”

Drake looked again along the road that led to the tower. Nothing moved. Even the faint breeze, with its odd smell, had died away to nothing. The setting sun was hidden behind a cloud bank.

“I’m going to take a quick look inside. Do you know what the roof is like?”

“It is no longer visible because of the clouds, but our earlier survey showed two large round openings. Nothing could be seen within them. If the room that you looked into is of typical height, the building has three floors above ground level. ”

“The ramp that I saw goes down, not up. I’ll see if there’s any way to reach the upper floors.”

Drake moved forward and stepped high across the ledge. He could not avoid treading on the plants at the other side. They gave beneath his weight, with a squeaking sound of crushed rubbery tendrils.

“Are we still in contact?”

The communications unit remained silent. Drake hurried across the room and into the next one. It contained gray machinery, solid, alien, and uninformative. He saw a tubby upright cylinder about three feet high that could have been anything from a spacewarp to a dishwasher. He ran his hand across the upper surface. His fingers came away covered with grime. Everything was coated with a thick, uniform layer of dust.

The ramp was steep by human standards, tilted at thirty degrees. He moved carefully downward, pushing his way through sheets of sticky material, thin as gossamer, that broke easily under his hands. Suddenly it was much darker. There was no opening to the outside at this level, and the sunlight that bled in from above was less and less. In another five minutes he would have to turn back. He wished that he had brought a light from the pinnace. Any

exploration of lower levels would have to wait until morning.

He had reached the bottom of the ramp. His shoe hit something that rolled away in front of him. He moved toward it and bent low to see what he had kicked.

After one look he froze in his stooped position. He could not see colors in the gloom, but his foot had struck an object of a familiar size and shape. It was like one of the pink snails that crawled around the fence by the canal. This one was dead.

Drake picked it up. It was surprisingly light. The outer surface was smooth and rubbery, which allowed it to retain its original cylindrical shape, but the insides had been scooped out through a long slit at one end. He wondered for a moment if it were some kind of mummified form. His nose told him differently. It had been dead just long enough for the corpse to become putrid.

He could see half a dozen other remains on the floor ahead. One of them was bigger than the rest, a giant white version of the red multilegged creature that he had observed in the canal enclosure. Stretched upright, this one would loom over him. But it would never stretch over anything. It had been cut almost in two at its midsection.

He retreated, heading up the ramp a lot faster than he had descended. Sticky cobwebs clung to him, and he held up his arm to shield his eyes. He did not feel at ease until he had retraced his path, scrambled over the ledge, and was standing in gloomy twilight.

“Do we have contact?”

“I am receiving your signal clearly. I do not have visual monitoring.”

The ship’s voice was infinitely reassuring. Drake looked up into a heavy overcast, shielding his eyes against a rain that was gradually becoming stronger.

“I’m done for the day. I’m heading for the pinnace. I don’t think we’ll find any manufacturing capability here, but I want to take another look inside the buildings tomorrow.”

As Drake spoke he was moving rapidly along the road, head ducked to keep cold drops of rain out of his eyes. He lifted his head for a moment to peer through the downpour and halted abruptly. The lander should have been by the side of the road, fifty or sixty meters from the buildings. The field ahead stretched far away. It was empty.

Had he turned himself around and headed out of town in a different direction?

That was impossible. He had left the building by the same opening and moved directly away from the tall central tower. He could see a flattened place in the field where the lander had been.

“Did you do something with the pinnace?”

“Certainly not. Has it been interfered with?”

“Worse than that — it’s gone.”

He hurried forward. Soon he was close enough to see other marks in the soaked vegetation. There was a distinct trail running off toward the town. The lander was equipped with a hover and forward motion capability, but that had not been used. Something had dragged it along the ground.

“I can see where it went. I’m going to follow.”

Not just dragged, but hauled without caring whether or not the lander was damaged. As Drake followed the broad furrow, he came across a strip of metal and a torn-off bar from one of the lander’s ground legs. He picked the bar up and held it close to his face. In addition to muddy streaks, it bore smudges as though something had picked it up, held it, and discarded it.

The trail led not to the nearest building, but to a bigger one on the left. The wall had a great black emblem marked in its middle. As Drake went closer he realized that the dark area was a gap in the wall itself. The furrow he was following led toward it, then faded to nothing as the surface changed from soft soil to hard impermeable material.

“I think the lander has been taken inside a building.”

“What are you proposing to do?”

“I don’t have a choice. I have to recover the lander. Without it, there’s no way to get back to orbit.”

“You could wait until morning. ”

“I daren’t. It may have been accidental, but there has been damage.”

As Drake spoke he was moving toward the building. He went carefully and quietly, the bar from the pinnace’s landing gear held close to his chest. Everything was silent except for the slowing patter of raindrops.

At the wall he halted. The opening was big enough to take the whole lander. Was it just inside, where he might fly it right out again? Or had it been dragged down a ramp to some deeper level?

He took two cautious steps inside. Immediately he felt a violent blow on his ribs, just below the left nipple. He swung the bar without thinking. It crunched into something that screamed, so loudly and at so high a pitch that it hurt his ears. He felt a blow on his left hip, then another on his right arm. Two invisible objects brushed past him. He turned and followed. He was in time to see two tall white shapes vanishing into the twilight.

The rain had slowed to a few random drops. A ghostly flicker of light showed, far off across the field. Then another.

A creaking sound came from behind him. He quickly spun around to face it.

No tall white shape was leaping out of the dark doorway to attack him, but suddenly there was another flicker of light from inside the building. It provided enough illumination for him to see the lander. It had been hauled into the middle of the room and tilted onto its side. Unless it could be righted, it would not fly. ?

“Are you hurt?” The ship could not see him, but it was receiving a record of his rapid movements.

“I’m all right. But the lander is damaged.”

“Can it be fixed?”

“I don’t know.” Again there was light inside the building, this time a ruddy glare that varied in brightness like a sputtering flame. “I have to go in again.”

The ship said something in reply, but he did not hear it. His attention was focused on the wall beyond the opening. It reflected light from sources farther inside. Torches burned there, orange red and erratic.

Drake moved forward, the rough-edged metal bar over his shoulder. He thought he was ready, but the speed and violence of the attack surprised him.

Half a dozen of them came out of the darkness like white ghosts. They had crouched waiting at the side of the room. Sharp pincers sank into his left arm. His reflexive jerk backward at the sudden pain saved him. The crude machete that slashed at his middle cut through his clothing but made only a long and shallow skin wound.

He turned and smashed at the pincered head. It shattered and splashed cold liquid over his face and neck. He continued his turn, flailing away at anything within reach. The ghost with the machete whistled and screeched as the metal bar caught it solidly in the middle. It fell away, taking another with it. Then Drake was running for the opening. The torchlight behind him was brighter.

He ran thirty yards from the building before he turned to look behind. Everything was quiet. No white shapes sprang through the hole in the wall. No orange torches flared from inside. For the moment he was safe.

“Are you receiving me clearly?”

“Perfectly clearly. I project clearing skies and visual oversight in another two hours.”

“That will be too long. Listen carefully and place this into the permanent record.” The admonition was unnecessary, but Drake had to be sure. “Your suggestion that this planet has gone beyond the postindustrial phase was correct, but the principal intelligence has not moved to a more advanced form. It has regressed to primitivism. We did not observe the dominant intelligence earlier, because it is nocturnal and spends the days underground in these buildings. Based on what I have seen, there is no chance that this planet will provide the space-borne technology that we need. Many of the old systems are still running, but I’d guess that the present inhabitants have little idea how they work. It’s just as likely that they worship them now.

“Here are your instructions. Continue the search for a space-faring civilization throughout this galaxy. If you are

successful, resurrect a copy of me and enlist the aid of whatever beings you find. If you search this whole galaxy and find nothing useful, do not continue to the next nearest one. The quest for our home galaxy without a signal to guide us could take to the end of time. Instead, begin a survey of this galaxy with a different objective. Look for a stellar system where raw materials are available in easily accessible form. You know what is needed for the creation of an S-wave signal detector. When you reach the right stellar system, resurrect copies of me, as many as will be needed to perform the space construction work. Build the signal detector, and use it. Do you understand these instructions?”

“I understand their meaning, but not your reason for giving them. What of you ? Do you not propose to seek the lander and return to orbit?”

“I wish I could do that.”

“Then why do you give me instructions that omit discussion of your own future actions’?”

“Because I don’t think my actions here are going to have much bearing on what you must do.” Drake could see the flicker of torches within the building. “I think the Morlocks are getting ready to try again.”

“I do not understand the term ‘Morlocks.’ ”

“That’s all right. I didn’t expect you to.” The torches inside the building were brighter. Drake backed up a few steps. He could smell his own blood, a strong and characteristic scent that he had known only once before in his life. He rubbed at his wounded left arm, then at the cut on his right side. It was strange how little he felt the pain. How would they attack, singly or in groups? Would he be better off in the open, or with his back against one of the walls?

“I suggest that you proceed with patience. It is not necessary for you to return to orbit in the immediate future. The local food substances are not suitable for you, but I can transmit information for their processing that will allow you to consume them. The life expectancy of your body is many centuries. In that time the situation on the surface may change.”

“It will change all right.” Drake turned, wondering if he might find a hiding place along the road or out in the fields. He saw lights, far off but steadily nearing. He would do better to head for the nearest building and make his stand there.

“In any case.” The ship spoke while he was sprinting across sodden vines. “I cannot desert you. I must stay here as long as you survive. That may be centuries.”

“It may. It would be nice to think that it will be.” Drake was panting, his back to the building wall. He clutched his metal bar, all that he had to hold on to. The torches were nearing, crowding in to make a dense ring through which he saw no way to break. “Stay until I die, then go.”

They were closer. Long bodies gleamed pale orange in the smoky light of torches held in spidery forelimbs. He could see the razor-sharp pincers. They gaped wide enough to grasp his head. He lifted the metal bar, weighing it in his hands.

“Wish me luck.” He took a deep breath through his mouth. “It won’t be long now.”

Interlude: Dutchman

The monitor ships had been designed by Cass Leemu and Mel Bradley with great care and ingenuity. They must be able to survive without external services or maintenance for up to a million years in orbit, all the while performing continuous observation and analysis. They must be entirely self-sufficient, able to take energy as necessary from any source. They must contain enough stored information to answer any question that a copy of Drake Merlin, embodied on the surface of a planet and awaiting the arrival of the Shiva, might ask.

The composites represented by Cass and Mel had been careful and ingenious in their work, but not wasteful. They did not include features that could not under any reasonable scenario be needed.

So no plan had been made for a ship to survive passage through a caesura. No ship had been designed to operate in galaxies far from human control and influence. No capability had been included for the on-board production of self-replicating machines. The design guaranteed that a ship be able to operate for millions of years, but not for

unspecified billions.

Cass and Mel, at Drake’s insistence, had gone beyond reasonable and foreseeable needs in just one area. The first humans, long ago, had emerged from the caves of Pleistocene Earth with brains already large enough to write sonnets, invent and play chess, compose fugues, and solve partial differential equations. They had not really needed such abilities in a world where hunting, gathering food, breeding, and nurturing seemed the only fixed constants. But a bigger-than-necessary brain had proved an advantage. It might be necessary again. Drake wanted each ship to be created not only self-aware, but intelligent enough to review the probable consequences of its instructions and of its own actions.

This ship had received unusual and specific instructions: Seek a civilization that was already space-faring. Then rouse Drake from dormancy to interact with whatever — if anything — was found. Should no space-faring intelligence be located, within this galaxy, build a superluminal signal detector. Drake would have to be roused from dormancy and embodied to help with that, because the ship lacked the general-purpose robots needed for large space construction.

The instructions implied several other imperatives. First, the ship must survive. It must do whatever was needed to ensure its continued operation. It must also be patient.

The ship wandered alone across the sea of stars. There was no way that it could ever land on a body bigger than a small asteroid. Its own weight would destroy its fragile structure. A copy of Drake Merlin, far more robust, could be downloaded into an organic body while the ship was in orbit around a planet and landed there, but it was impossible for a large S-wave detector to be constructed on a planetary surface.

Remaining in operating condition would not be difficult for the ship itself. Material resources for self-renewal were plentiful around many stars and in the dust clouds scattered through the spiral arms.

In any case, that was not going to be the problem.

The ship found an open lane of the galaxy and drifted along it, far from the disturbing effects of suns and singularities and dust clouds. It performed its careful analysis: eighty-eight billion stars in this galaxy; a mere two hundred targets as sources of potential intelligence — -five-eighths of them already eliminated by direct inspection. It would be a straightforward if lengthy task to look at the rest. The ship could certainly handle that.

But now, assume that the search was unsuccessful, that no space-going intelligent life was found, that it was necessary to take the next step. Then the time scale for action expanded enormously. Years increased from millions to billions. To build an S-wave detector — one large enough to see into the deepest reaches of space — was a monstrous task. Drake Merlin, in his final orders from the clouded surface of the planet, could not have known what he was demanding.

But the ship knew.

It also knew that it had no choice. Unlike a human, a ship’s brain could not elect the annihilation of self.

As the ship computed the trajectory for the next target star, it mapped out the mandated sequence of its future actions if the current search failed to produce the right kind of intelligent life.

Find the right type of dust cloud, one close enough to a recent supernova to be rich in the necessary heavy elements. Embody Drake Merlin — not once, but in a hundred or a thousand or a million copies. (And never consider their eventual fate.) Use the Merlins, singly and working in unison, as laborers. In the absence of intelligent robots, Merlins must mine the dust cloud, build the space production facility, shape the strands of the antennas and stretch them across space in the precise configuration demanded for signal detection of S-wave sources.

It could be done. The ship saw practical obstacles — it must husband its limited drive, coasting without power for thousands of years between target stars, taking advantage of every natural force field and particle wind of the galaxy; but there was nothing impossible.

Except, perhaps, for the time that all this would take.

The ship made the calculation and regarded the result. It could not sigh or wince, but it wished that it was possible to go back to Drake Merlin in the last moments before the horde of white ghosts had swarmed over him, and ask if this was what he really wanted.

It knew the answer to that question. The on-board information base made it clear: Drake Merlin did not want any of

this. He wanted his lost wife. The odds against that made everything in the ship’s calculations seem like certainty by comparison.

The next target star was known, the most economical flight path computed and ready. There was no further reason for delay.

The ship set out on its multibillion-year journey, sailing the endless trade winds of an indifferent galaxy.

Chapter 28

“From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky”

Who would ever have thought that it could take so long?

Drake drifted through space, his suited body slowly turning. He had left the ship in order to inspect the overall condition of the structure. How many times had he been downloaded to do this, he or some other of the multiple copies of himself? How many times had everything been found to be in working order, and how many times had he returned to electronic storage?

A thousand, ten thousand, a million. It made no difference. The S-wave detector was all around, a construct whose nodes and gossamer filaments stretched away past the point where his eyes could trace their presence against the stars. The great array was supposed to be able to detect evidence of superluminal message activity out to the red shift limit. It had been set up to operate automatically and indefinitely, if necessary without human or ship supervision. One by one, galaxies would be looked at until the whole universe had been surveyed. The process would stop only when a signal was detected. So far the instrument had reported nothing but a steady hiss of background noise.

If the array was working to specification, was something wrong with the basic theory? In principle a super-luminal signal would traverse the universe in hours; but confirmation of the theory had been made only in the home galaxy, over distances a millionth as far as current needs.

His attention moved beyond the detector array to the far-off glow of stars and galaxies. His eyes could not see the change, but he knew that it was there.

Not the end yet, but the subtle beginning of the end. Already the great dust clouds had been consumed, the blazing blue supergiant stars long ago exploded to supernovas or collapsed to black holes. Every main sequence star was far along in its lifetime, reduced from a bloated red giant to a white dwarf hardly bigger than the original Earth. Only the slow-burning low-mass stars remained, doling out miserly dribbles of radiation; their energy supply would be sufficient for another hundred billion years.

Except that such a period was not available. The cosmos itself was evolving, changing. The ship reported to Drake that the universe was far past its critical point. The remote galaxies displayed a strong blue shift, a displacement of the light toward shorter wavelengths. The microwave background radiation, diluted and cooled during the earlier expansion of the universe, now revealed an increase in its black body temperature.

The universe was warming up. The Great Expansion was far in the past. The collapse, toward the final singularity and the end of time, was under way.

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool; and time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.

Drake halted his drift through space but permitted the slow rotation of his suited figure. He, like time, was taking survey of all the world. It seemed his task must have no stop — until the universe itself put an end to it.

The current inspection was complete. He might as well head back to the ship. On the other hand, there was no hurry. When he returned he would be uploaded again to electronic storage. His new sleep might be for a million or a billion years, but he could expect little change when he awoke. The march from here to the end of the universe would be slow and stately, a multibillion-year progression. Only the final months and days would be spectacular. To anyone around to watch them, they would display unimaginable violence.

The ship was a tiny gleam of gold at the center of the black web of the S-wave detection system. Drake headed toward it, glancing from time to time to his left. The dust cloud that had provided the materials for the detector still hung there, glowing faintly by its internal light. It was too small to collapse under its own gravitational attraction. That, and the constraining field placed in position by the ship, had been the key to its continued survival.

Drake, occupied with his thoughts, had turned off the suit unit linking him with the ship. There was no danger in doing so. Communications could be activated in an emergency by the ship’s brain, although the many billions of years since entering the caesura had never produced a single override.

He switched the communicator on when he was just a few kilometers from the ship, and was shocked to hear a brief repeated message.

“Superluminal signal activity has been detected. Analysis is under way. Superluminal—”

“What! Why didn’t you call and tell me?”

“That seemed… premature.” The ship was oddly hesitant. “There are anomalies that require explanation.”

“Then you’d better tell me about them.” Drake was sliding through the molecular interstitial lock at record speed. He felt a sense of exultation at his special good fortune. He had been the one embodied when the signal came! Then he felt stupid. Since every embodiment was one version of him, there was no way that he could not be the one embodied when an S-wave message was detected.

“Where does the signal come from?”

“It is multiple signals, from a galaxy about eight hundred million light-years away. In cosmic terms, that is rather close. It lies on the far side of one of the great gulfs, but in a super-cluster that is still one of our neighbors.”

“What do the messages say?”

“That is where the anomaly begins. First, the signals lack standard header records, identifying their source and destination. ”

“Maybe they were broadcast.”

“That cannot be the case. An S-wave signal is like any other, it must be tightly beamed to be read at more than a few hundred light-years. But even if the signals had been broadcast, they would carry a source identification. That, however, is not the most disturbing feature. The real problem is that the signals are unintelligible. We are not dealing with a single detected signal, where the problem might be one of resolving ambiguities. We are picking up millions of bit streams, an abundance of test data. Although we carry with us every known communication protocol, these superluminal signals conform to none of them.”

“Maybe it’s a new protocol, something that came into use after we passed through the caesura. We’ve been gone for so long, changes are inevitable.”

“True. But the signals are totally unrecognizable. Change is more than likely, it is even necessary to reflect new needs and new technology. However, just as the human body carries within it elements of your own most archaic history, from fingernails to body hair to embryonic gill slits, so any superluminal signal ought to carry at least some semblance of the old communication protocols. These do not. They are wholly unfamiliar. ”

“Are you still working to crack them?”

“Naturally. However, I am not optimistic. Already I have employed eighty percent of the analytical tools available to me, with no success. The most probable explanation is also the least satisfying.”

Drake didn’t need to ask what it was. The possibility had been discussed with the ship’s brain during each of his embodiments.

“Assume that it is an independent civilization, aliens who have never encountered humans but are advanced enough to use S-wave signaling. How would it affect our ability to send a signal to them?”

“To send a signal? That would be very easy. Our S-wave detector can transmit as accurately and rapidly as it receives. That would not seem to be the issue here. The question is, What will happen to our signal when it is received in the other galaxy?”

“That’s going to be my problem, isn’t it?” Drake saw no point in talking generalities any longer. “Once I’m back in electronic storage, how long will it take to transmit me superluminally?”

“A few hours at the most. ”

“Then let’s do it. You said eight hundred million light-years?”

“Eight hundred and eighteen million, to be more precise. ”

“How much travel time is that for you — allowing for fuel and maintenance and everything else?”

“Most would have to be in coast phase, since between the galaxies there are no ready sources of materials or energy. Necessarily, that would imply long periods of low or zero acceleration. The travel time would be a billion years or more.”

“You can survive that?”

“Of course. Already we have endured tens of times that interval. However, I must mention two other anomalous features of the received signals. First, although there are many signals, million after million of them, they clearly fall into two different types.”

“How do you know that, if you can’t understand what they say?”

“By statistical analysis of the bit streams. That analysis clearly reveals two distinct types, although the content of either type remains unknown. And that is the second anomaly. In principle, my analytical tools should permit the interpretation of any possible signal whatsoever. It makes no difference if the sender is human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic, familiar or utterly alien. If the laws of logic, which we have always believed to be universal, are being followed, the signal should be intelligible.”

“But these are not? Very curious. Chances are it will be easier to sort out what’s going on when we’re there to see it.” But Drake was expressing a confidence that he did not feel. He sensed old memories stirring within him. Two kinds of signal that clearly were signals, but neither of which could be interpreted. Why did that sound familiar?

“First, switch me back to electronic storage. Then send me on my way. After I’m gone, you can take the slow road and join me.” Signals that could not be understood. Algorithms that should be able to interpret anything, but failed to do so. He postponed the question. He would have time to consider it when he reached the signal source. “Let’s get me to electronic form, so I can go to work. Assuming that things work out all right, I’ll beam myself back here and tell you what’s going on.”

Assuming that things work out all right.

It occurred to Drake, rising to consciousness, that nothing had gone right for aeons. They had certainly not gone right this time. Rather than waking in some other galaxy, delivered as an S-wave and reconstructed to consciousness, he was still on board the ship. And although he was awake, he was certainly not embodied. Instead he was in electronic form, sharing sensors and processors with the ship. He was also aware of the hundred or more other versions of himself, dormant around him.

“All right. It didn’t work. What’s happening now?”

Part of the answer came to him even before the ship spoke. The visible light sensors revealed face-on the disk of a barred galaxy. From the way that it filled the sky ahead, they were within a few tens of thousands of light-years — touching distance, in intergalactic terms.

Also, it was the galaxy. The ship’s signal-receiving equipment showed the spiral arms filled with the glittering sparks of S-wave transmissions. The galaxy flamed with them, bright flickering points of blue and crimson. They had been color coded by the ship into type 1 and type 2 — statistically different from each other, but equally mysterious.

If the ship was here, so close to the source of the signals, then a billion years or more must have passed since he was last conscious.

Why wasn’t the ship answering his question? And then Drake realized that the ship had answered. A new block of information had been transferred, and his electronic consciousness was already processing it, thousands or millions of times faster than his old organic one. He knew, without being told…

The ship had remained for centuries at the focal point of the giant array. It had transmitted Drake as a superluminal

signal — not once but a hundred times and more. It had waited patiently for a return signal. Nothing came into the array but the same endless stream of unintelligible communications.

At last the ship had to make a difficult choice. If it left the array, all chance of receiving an intergalactic signal from Drake was lost. The ship would be forced to rely again on the simple S-wave detection system that it carried on board. On the other hand, to remain in one place and wait for a signal from Drake might take until the end of the universe.

Finally the ship abandoned the array and set out on its lonely billion-year journey across the intergalactic gulf. In doing so, it lost the ability to pick up superluminal signals from its destination until the target galaxy was close enough for the on-board system to operate.

How close?

This close. Close enough for the ship to employ a synthetic aperture optical system, able to produce visible wavelength pictures of surface detail on planets the size of Earth.

And now a new problem arose. It was baffling enough for the ship to know that it needed help. It had brought Drake to consciousness.

And because he would need direct access to all sensor inputs, and because in any case there was no planet within twenty thousand light-years where an embodied organic form might prove useful, the ship employed a different procedure. It did not embody the aroused intelligence, but resurrected it in electronic form.

Drake examined one of the planetary images as the ship drifted steadily on through space. The world was superficially Earth-like, sufficiently massive and far enough from its primary to hold an atmosphere. It should have had air of some kind, nitrogen or methane or carbon dioxide or, if it bore life, oxygen and water vapor. No trace of any showed up in the gas spectral analysis. The surface, unobscured by clouds or a shroud of air, was black rock. It looked like volcanic basalt that had flowed under high temperature before pooling and hardening to grotesque formations. There was no sign of surface water, no sign of life or surface artifacts. Orbiting the world like a swarm of lightning bugs were hundreds of objects too small to be seen with the imagers. However, from time to time a flash from one of them showed that it was transmitting, and the ship was receiving, an outgoing S-wave signal.

What was there to talk about in facilities that orbited long-dead worlds?

Drake tracked the destinations of the outgoing data bursts, and the ship offered their images at his command: world after world, scene after scene of charred devastation. Every planet was in ruins. Each was clearly lifeless.

“I have performed as complete a survey as possible from this distance.” The ship’s messages were clear and easy now that Drake knew how to listen to them. “The pattern repeats from one side of the galaxy to the other, from the outer rim to the central disk. Those worlds have in common what I have termed a type one superluminal message capability. Compare them with the type two worlds.”

Another sequence of planets was offered for Drake’s inspection. From the ship’s point of view, there were large differences. From a human point of view, one similarity overwhelmed every other factor: organic life was absent.

Drake examined a thousand type 2 planets where everything that humans had learned of physics, planetology, and biology suggested that life should have developed. The sun was an appropriate spectral type, surface temperature was in the right range, the planet had a low-eccentricity orbit, there was plenty of surface water, and a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen.

Life should have developed — must have developed. And it had developed. The proof was in the swarm of active devices around each world, emitting and receiving their bursts of S-wave signals. No one would install such a system without a purpose. Life had once been on all these worlds. And somehow life had been destroyed, not as spectacularly as on the type 1 worlds, but just as finally.

“The problem is one that we never anticipated.” Was that the ship speaking, or Drake’s own thoughts? The dividing line became blurred when they shared common storage and processing power. “We had always assumed that superluminal signal capability would be accompanied by a working technology. Now we find abundant S-wave capacity and nothing else. Do we wish to visit a galaxy that seems dead of organic life?”

“Is it safe to do so?”

The last thought was surely Drake’s alone. His thoughts were moving again to old memories and offering an uneasy

synthesis.

In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.

He had been talking to himself, but his thoughts were no longer private.

“The universe is not infinite,” the ship said. “It is finite in time both past and future, and it is finite but unbounded in space.”

“All right. Change that to things that you never expected to happen, when you were long ago on a world far away, can happen if you wait long enough and go far enough.”

He not only hadn’t expected to see this — when he was young he had hardly taken notice of it. His interests revolved around music and Ana, and anything as dull as military policy or political strategy tended to be ignored. It was Ana, the social activist, who had educated him. He remembered one lazy October afternoon when they lay side by side in his little one-room apartment, with the Venetian blinds partly drawn and late sunlight casting elongated and distorted leaf shadows on the wall. Drake lay flat on his back. He didn’t want to talk or think about anything and would have quite liked a nap. He found it easier to say nothing and pretend to listen, but he had got away with that for only a few minutes.

“You don’t care, do you?” Ana punched him on the left shoulder and propped herself up on her elbow so that she could see his face and make sure that he wasn’t going to sleep. “I’m telling you, it could happen again.”

“Nah. Mutual Assured Destruction is a dead idea. And a dumb idea, too.”

“It’s worse than dumb, but I’m not sure it’s dead. Brains and resources were wasted on it for two generations. Do you want to know why?”

Not really. But Drake said only, “Uh-huh.”

“It kept on going because it was a big fat money tree, where corruption could thrive and contractors could get very rich. And because no matter what you do, for paranoid people more is never enough. If they build more weapons, or even if you just think that they might, you have to build more. They’re as crazy as you are, so they have to build more, too; so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more…”

She paused, rather to Drake’s disappointment. The cadence of the repeated phrase was relaxing, and he would happily have nodded off listening to it. Instead he said, “I don’t know why you’re still worrying about all this. It’s ancient history. MAD went away over twenty years ago, along with the Soviet Union.”

She snuggled up against him and put her hand flat on his bare belly. “That proves how little you understand the military. I drank this stuff in with my mother’s milk. Four of my uncles and five of my cousins are regular army or air force. You should hear the talk at family reunions. You did me a big favor. They can’t stand your politics.”

“I don’t have any.”

“That’s almost worse. But they don’t want you around, and that gives me an excuse to stay away. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

“You can thank me by letting me rest. Anyway, you shouldn’t be thanking me. Thank Professor Bonvissuto. He got you the scholarship.”

“I’ll thank both of you. You know what Uncle Dan said? He’s the air force colonel, the one from Baltimore who told you that the finest vocal group in the world was the Singing Sergeants, and that Wagner was a boring old weirdo.”

“I remember him. Rossini said much the same — about Wagner, I mean, not the Singing Sergeants. He said Wagner had beautiful moments, but awful quarter hours. He also said that he couldn’t judge Wagner’s Lohengrin from a single hearing, and he certainly didn’t intend hearing it a second time.”

“Ideas in the military don’t go away, ever, Uncle Dan says.” Ana wasn’t going to let Drake distract her with musical anecdotes. “Old ideas get put on the shelf, and when the right funding cycle comes around they’re dusted off and proposed again as new. I don’t believe a lot of what he tells me, but I believe that. Balance of terror didn’t start with Mutual Assured Destruction. And it won’t end with it. Bad ideas are still sitting there on the shelf.”

And sometimes they sit on that shelf for an awfully long time before they finally achieve their potential.

“I do not think that I am following you,” the ship said.

It was hardly surprising — Drake’s private thoughts had not been intended for anyone else. They had hopped randomly between past and present, and they included personal references that were surely not in any general database.

Drake addressed his remarks directly to the ship’s interface. “Mutual Assured Destruction is a very simple idea: I build huge weapons systems. So do you. Then you daren’t attack me, because if you do, I’ll attack you in return and you’ll die, too.” (He had killed Ana, and he had died, too. He had thought of his actions as Mutual Assured Survival. Did that make him any different from the Mutual Assured Destruction lunatics?) “So neither one of us dares to attack the other. It sounds as though it might work, but MAD has one fatal flaw. It produces an equilibrium between two groups, but it’s an unstable equilibrium. One accident, or even a misunderstanding, and both sides will use their weapons. They have to hit as hard as they can immediately, to neutralize as much of the other’s firepower as they can. Just as bad, a third group with very few weapons can force a misunderstanding and make the two big powers fight each other, by faking an attack of one on the other. I think we are looking at the results when MAD is applied on a huge scale. I think it killed that whole galaxy.”

“That cannot be true. Even now, I am detecting new superluminal messages. I cannot understand them, but it proves that intelligence continues to operate there.”

“Intelligence of a sort. Sometimes if an idea is old enough, it can seem brand new. I ought to have known what was going on ages ago, as soon as you told me that there were two distinct types of signals coming from this galaxy, and that you were unable to interpret either of them. You said that any signal at all should be intelligible to you. But suppose it was designed not to be understood by anyone without a suitable key? Suppose both sides were employing ciphers, codes that the other could not break.”

“Intentional obscurity. That is certainly possible. But what makes you so sure that the galaxy is dead? How can that be true, and the technology still be working?”

Drake realized that he could explain even that. His mind had thrown at him an image of a long-ago performance of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, of a conductor facing a group of players. In front of each stood a lighted candle. One by one, each musician finished his or her own orchestral part, snuffed out the candle, and left the stage. Finally the whole orchestra was gone. The conductor stood alone in darkness.

The ship was unlikely to benefit much from that thought. “Let me tell you what happened on Earth,” Drake said, “in the years just after I was born. Two great powers had been busy building up their nuclear weapons. The chance of all-out war seemed very high. That war, if it happened, would be short. A couple of hours and it would be all over. Missiles over the pole could be launched to reach any target within thirty minutes. The military on one side — our side, people would say, though I never thought of it as my side — decided that they must keep some kind of communications system working, even after the main war was over. They imagined a space-based command post, a whole constellation of special satellites in orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft would be completely operated by computers, and they would form a kind of central nervous system for all fighting, no matter when it happened. The system was called MILSTAR, for Military Strategic, Tactical, and Relay system, and it was supposed to be able to function even after the main spasm of war was over. The military planners didn’t intend for MILSTAR to help with civilian reconstruction. That wasn’t its job. They wanted it to handle military communications — and to be able to support fighting again, if necessary, months or years later. They wanted MIL-STAR ready to fight another war. It was designed to function even if all the surface command structures had been obliterated. It was supposed to be able to call on robot weaponry, whether or not there were humans around.”

The image came again. The conductor stood facing a full complement of players. As the military .powers on land, sea, and air were snuffed out by enemy action, MILSTAR continued, organizing and optimizing resources that became smaller every second. Finally, the stage held nothing but orchestral desks and empty instrument cases. The conductor waved his baton over a vanished army of players. MILSTAR floated serenely on through space, its communications system in full working order and ready to shape a second symphony of Armageddon.

“The MILSTAR satellites had to be very sophisticated. They needed a long operating lifetime. They had to be mobile, to avoid direct missile attack; durable, to operate for years without a single human mind to direct them; robust, to survive electromagnetic pulse effects and near misses; and smart, able to talk easily to each other using a variety of encrypted signals, so that the enemy could never crack the global communications network.

“It was a highly secret project. It had to be. That was why it was able to obtain huge funding for a long time, even though anyone who looked at it objectively could see why it wouldn’t work. It needed tens of millions of computer instructions, lines of program code that could only be tested when the actual war was declared. It assumed a static world order, with a single well-defined enemy. It bypassed every civilian chain of command. Worst of all, it assumed

that one side or the other could win an all-out nuclear war, and be all set to fight again. No mention of hundreds of millions of casualties, or disabled food and water and sewage and transportation systems, or a totally collapsed economy that couldn’t pay ten cents for a military budget.

“Well, we were lucky. MILSTAR came out from behind its veil of secrecy, little by little. That doomed it. It couldn’t stand the sunlight. Finally, after years and years of staggering along when no one really believed in it but kept it going as a source of jobs and a political pork barrel, the money was cut off and the development ended. MILSTAR never became a working system — on Earth. But something like it was developed, and is still in operation” — Drake indicated the galaxy ahead of the ship — “there.”

Drake had been carried away, in time and space and in a depth of feeling lost to him for aeons. He knew he had spoken for Ana, more than for himself. Those had been her voiced fears, her indignation, her relief at an earthly doom avoided. He also realized, for the first time, that existence in a purely electronic form could admit emotion and passion and longing.

The ship had absorbed the facts of his message, if not its intensity. “So although an S-wave signal system exists in that galaxy,” it said, “the original creators and owners are long vanished. Therefore no moral or practical impediment exists to our taking over its use. We should find it possible to inhibit the encryption system. As soon as we have done that, and our own type of S-wave signals can be sent and received—”

“We can’t do that.”

“I believe that I possess the necessary analytical capabilities, even though you may not be aware of them.”

“That’s not the problem. The problem is in going there.” Drake again indicated the galaxy ahead of them.

“We are only twenty-one thousand light-years away. We have traveled forty thousand times that distance already, without difficulty. The remaining journey is negligible.”

“No. It’s the place where we can expect trouble. Look at them.” Drake displayed an array of blackened and silent worlds for the ship’s attention. “We can’t say what did this, and for all we know it may still be working. Maybe it’s waiting for something new that it can hit. The weapons ran out of targets. We don’t know that they ran out of anything else. Just because a galaxy is dead of life doesn’t mean it’s safe to go there.”

“Then I request that you propose an alternative.” The ship turned its imaging equipment, swinging slowly from the island of matter ahead to the great ocean of space that surrounded it. “The next nearest galaxy is two and a quarter million light-years away. It showed no evidence of S-wave transmission. Do you suggest that we change to it as our target? I am ready to follow your instructions.”

And that was the devil of it. There was no better alternative. No other galaxy, in a search that stretched halfway across time, had displayed superluminal signals. It was a poor moment to decide that the ship had left the big detection system, laboriously constructed over so many years, prematurely. But it was true. The smart thing would have been to survey every galaxy in the universe for S-wave transmissions, before rushing off to tackle the enigma of the one that lay ahead.

It was Drake’s fault. He should have thought harder and longer before he acted. The price of mindless action was high: they had to return to their detection system, a billion years away, and follow that with another interminable search.

That was the price. But he was not willing to pay it.

Surely something could be done with the facilities that lay ahead of them, so temptingly close? Compared with the other option, twenty thousand light-years was like stepping to the house next door. He knew, with absolute certainty, that a full superluminal capability existed here, in perfect working order. Nothing like it might be found again before the universe itself came to a close.

As the field of view of the ship’s sensors performed its steady turn in space, Drake watched the grand sweep of the galaxies. They had not changed. He had changed. When had he lost his will and daring? When had he become so cautious?

Long ago, without a second thought, he had risked everything. Now, no matter what he did, he would be risking less than everything. Other versions of him surely still existed, even if they happened to be at the far edge of the universe. They did not know that he existed — they would think that he had died fifteen billion years ago, when the ship was swallowed by the caesura. But what of that? They should still be there. Did he have anything to lose, if now he risked the dark menace ahead?

“Aye, but to die, and go we know not where …”

Was that all it was? Simple fear of death?

“Are we still heading for the galaxy?”

“Yes. We have not changed our course.”

“Then forget the alternative. Hold our path. Take us to the nearest world where you are detecting a source of S-wave messages.”

There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

And how long since he had thought of that? It was time to take a chance, and test the kindness of reality.

Taking a chance on one thing did not mean abandoning caution in everything else.

Drake elected to remain conscious, though not embodied, through the whole slow approach to the galaxy. The ship’s speed had to be subluminal. Meanwhile, the S-wave messages flashed and flickered ahead from spiral arm to spiral arm, as enigmatic as ever. At Drake’s suggestion, the ship’s brain assumed that the messages were deliberately encrypted and tried to decipher them. The effort consumed the bulk of the ship’s computation powers for twelve thousand years. There was no useful result for either type 1 or type 2 messages.

While this was going on, Drake constantly monitored the galaxy ahead. He had no idea of the range of weapons that remained there. At any moment, the ship’s approach might be detected, and an alien force could reach out to consume them. He was ready to power the ship down totally and hope that silence would end the attack, or if that failed to turn the ship around and try to outrun the destruction.

The thirteenth millennium brought the change. It occurred while Drake and the ship were analyzing the comparative freedoms and restrictions of their two mentalities.

“What would you have done, in a similar situation?” The ship was dissatisfied with its own performance.

“Assuming that I were a ship, with your history and your inorganic intelligence? The first thing I would do, after Drake Merlin insisted on being sent as a superluminal signal to this galaxy, is tell myself that embodied humans tend to be impulsive and make decisions too quickly. We evolved that way, because the old human body rarely lasted a century. We were always in a hurry, we had to be. So as a ship I would have spent a long time evaluating my own possible actions. Then I hope I would have asked what could be done at the S-wave detection structure we built and nowhere else. When all those things were done, I would have headed this way.”

“And what would you have done as a human in the same situation?”

“If I could see no possible further use for my existence—”

Drake’s comments on suicide, an idea alien to the ship’s intelligence, were interrupted.

A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-. The ship’s S-wave detector screeched and warbled in overload as a message blared into it.

A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-.

“Is it coming from the galaxy?” Drake had to send his own thought at maximum volume to penetrate the curtain of incoming noise.

A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-.

“I do not know.” The ship’s own signal was barely intelligible. “The source is so powerful. It comes from everywhere. Wait.” The ship de-tuned its receiver, and the volume of signal suddenly dropped to a tolerable level.

WARNING. YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. DO NOT PROCEED FARTHER WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. REPEAT, YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. HALT, AND DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. WORKING S-WAVE COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS ARE CONTAINED IN CARRIER WAVE. VISUAL AND REAL-TIME INTERACTION FOLLOWS.

“I’m sending our identification and reply.” The ship was already transcribing protocols. “It is safe to do so. That signal

can’t be coming from the galaxy ahead.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there is no encryption. More than that, the signal is in standard form. It must be coming to us from our own form of mentality.”

Drake did not need that last piece of information. The promised visual and real-time information flow was beginning, and pictures were already flowing in. The first frame was very familiar. It was Drake Merlin, staring at something right in front of him. A puzzled voice was saying, “Please transmit that identification sequence again. There appears to have been a transcription error. According to our records, you don’t exist. You haven’t existed for fifteen billion years.”

Drake was not embodied, so he could not send an exultant real-time image of himself. The best that he could do was to provide his own stored and smiling icon, as it was preserved in the ship’s memory.

“What you have received is not a transcription error. We exist, and you have the right ID sequence. We’ve been heading for home all this time. I’m sorry that it took so long.” And then, the only thing that really mattered, the question: “Did you develop the technology needed to restore Ana? Is she there with you?”

While Drake waited for answers, he realized that everything else made sense. A rogue galaxy, devoid of life but sending out S-wave signals and filled with weapons of destruction, was a menace to every intelligence in the universe. A region around that galaxy was needed as a quarantine zone. All the approach routes had to be monitored. Like a dangerous reef in a peaceful sea, the galaxy must be surrounded by warning bells and lightships. It was a beacon for the whole universe, the best possible place for lost travelers, like Drake and the ship, to arrive at.

And arrive they had. They were on the way home.

In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.

One of those things, now and again, was a little bit of luck.

Chapter 29 Homecoming

With Drake’s return to human space, his problems seemed to be in the past.

The feeling of euphoria did not last. It ended when his question about Ana remained unanswered, and when the image of the other Drake Merlin vanished suddenly from the screen. It was replaced by the face of Tom Lambert. Tom’s features, hair color, and expression varied wildly for a few seconds before they stabilized.

“Unfortunately, Ana has not been resurrected.” Tom’s mouth shrank to half its size, then enlarged again. Drake had seen the effect before. Some strong emotion, fear or joy or rage, was distorting the presentation. “The problem of resurrection will be worked on.

Will be worked on, after so many aeons? Drake wondered what they had been doing all this time. What could possibly be left to do?

But Tom Lambert was continuing. “I’m sorry.” His face writhed with worry, then took on a lopsided smile. “We have not used this particular form of presentation for more than fifteen billion years. We never thought it would be necessary. A return such as yours was never anticipated, although we knew that the theory showed it to be formally possible. Now, of course, we understand exactly what happened. You and your ship remained in this universe, but you passed through a noncausal path in the caesura. Before you reemerged, you traveled seven billion light-years in space and eight billion years forward in time.”

“And then I couldn’t find you for umpteen billion more. But here I am. So what is there to be sorry about?”

“We are sorry that you encountered the warning concerning your approach to the Skrilant Galaxy.”

“I assume that I needed it.” Drake was not convinced by Tom Lambert’s explanation. “I presume I would have been blown apart otherwise.”

“That is most probable. But our warning included a representation of yourself.”

“So I met myself. Big deal. I survived.”

“But it was not yourself.” Tom glanced sideways, away from Drake. “You, as you are now, did not encounter the full present form of Drake Merlin. I should add that I form a minor subset of that whole. Very soon you will meet.”

“I think you’d better tell me what’s going on. This isn’t the sort of homecoming I was hoping for. What do you mean, I haven’t met my present self?”

“Drake Merlin, in all the universe except on your ship, you are no longer a single entity. The mentality of Drake Merlin, except for you, is a composite.”

“I don’t believe it.” Drake sensed coming disaster. “It’s the one thing I knew I could never afford to do. If I merged to a composite with anyone else, I knew I might lose sight of my goal.”

“But we did merge, in a different way. We regret that now. Sit quietly, Drake Merlin, for one moment more. We are opening an S-wave high-data-rate linkage with you- and your ship. Prepare for an update of many billions of years, since the time that you vanished from our horizon. Be prepared for strong coupling, then all your questions will be answered. The link is opening… now.”

Drake submerged beneath a torrent of data, a million parallel sources streaming in…

The struggle with the Shiva was ending. He saw new composites, part human, part Shiva, controlling the interaction between the two forms of life. Humans and the giant sessile plants might never understand each other, but with the right intermediaries they could coexist.

With success came a new problem. Through the endless years of battle, Drake had remained aloof. He dared not allow himself to become part of any composite, organic or inorganic, within the interconnected webs of consciousness. Nor would he share his personal data banks with anyone or anything. His logic was simple and invincible: He alone was willing to make the awful decisions of death and destruction needed to defeat the Shiva. He dared not risk any dilution of that will. But there was also the secret agenda: if he ceased to be a single individual, the drive to restore Ana might be lost.

For what seemed like forever, versions of his individual self had been downloaded and sent out on the warships, to meet their fiery or frigid end on planets at the edge of the Galaxy and beyond. With the Shiva ascendant that had been a oneway process. But in some of the spiral arms, humans at last began to hold their own. As they carried out their programs of counterattack and advance into the space between the galaxies, and then on through to other galaxies, human ships began to survive.

And now …

He was coming back, Drake Merlin in his billions; each of him was different, each had his own unique experiences, each was undeniably Drake.

He had held himself apart from all others. But how could he remain aloof and refuse access to himself?

He could not. Drake formed a composite, an unusual one: Every component would be Drake Merlin.

At first it was total chaos. His element selves numbered beyond the billions; he had long ago lost count of the number of times he had been downloaded, and the total constantly increased. Parts of him were close by, parts were separated from the rest by millions of light-years; some had been partly destroyed in combat and, become maimed or incomplete versions of a whole Drake Merlin. All, without exception, were now different. Time and events produced changes in form, perspective, even in self-image. Drake struggled to understand, to assimilate, to integrate, and to maintain or create a single personality among that teeming horde of selves.

He was no longer essential to the struggle with the Shiva. A truce, incomprehensible to any entity but one of the human/ Shiva symbiote framers, was signed. The need for oversight by Drake slowly diminished. As the threat of the Shiva receded and the need for his continuous involvement decreased, the Drake composite became increasingly consumed by introspection and by his own process of reconstruction. He took no interest in external events unless

they were relevant to a substantial fraction of his own components.

Those components were linked to other composites and to other data banks. They stretched out across the galactic clusters and the great rifts, on toward the edges of the accessible universe. Drake Merlin had become guardian and caretaker of the cosmos.

With the growth of his composite came something else: slowly and imperceptibly, his driving willpower weakened. Old desires, needs that had propelled him forward from the farthest reaches of the past, dwindled and faded. Old longings no longer mattered…

Until one day, unexpectedly, on the monitored boundary of the dead but malevolent Skrilant galaxy, a new but very old Drake Merlin appeared that formed no part of any other.

Within the vast extended composite of Drake Merlin, the news of the encounter stirred a curious uneasiness. The stranger was asking questions. The attempt to answer them called for the use of memories so far removed in time and space that they carried no physical impressions. The composite had to sift deep within its own data banks before it found answers.

The result was shocking. Drake Merlin had somehow, somewhere, lost the way. He had forgotten his own most solemn vows. Now he had to change — and wonder if there was time enough, before the end of the universe itself.

Drake emerged, to find Tom Lambert silently waiting. The data flood had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Drake realized something else. He was no longer on board his own ship, and he had become inexplicably different.

Tom Lambert nodded. “Your perception is correct. You were uploaded while the data transfer was proceeding, and superluminally transmitted here.”

“And embodied?” Drake worried about the long-lost feeling of a tangible self.

“That is no longer necessary. In fact, if you are to understand what we are doing, many parallel inputs continue to be necessary. In such circumstances, material embodiment is no longer possible.”

“Something has gone wrong, hasn’t it?”

“It has. We became distracted. What we are doing to correct it — if we can — is this.”

If the previous data flow had been a torrent, the new one was a tidal wave. It washed over Drake and carried him along without a choice.

First came a different sense of self. Drake Merlin had multiplied, a million, a billion, countless trillions of times. He was on every planet, in orbit around every star, present in every galaxy (even the lost Skrilant Galaxy Had its corps of Merlin mentalities). The distinction between organic and inorganic forms no longer meant anything. Changes from one to the other took place constantly. Drake felt his other self extending steadily across the whole universe. Even if he and the ship had done nothing but sit and wait after they passed through the caesura, eventually the extended composite would have discovered and recovered his lost individual self.

That individual self was in danger of drowning. He expressed his fear and heard the rest offering reassurance.

You can join us safely. You can never be lost. We are you.

“What are you doing?”

What we should have done long ago, and what we now must do. We are concerned not with individuals, but with universes. Remember this.

The trillions of voices became one:

In a closed universe, a final point of collapse lies at the end of time. The eschaton, the Omega Point, the c-point — the space-time final boundary has been given a variety of names. Its main properties have long been defined. One of those properties is of paramount importance: close to the c-boundary, all information — everything that ever can be known — becomes accessible. Everything that ever can be known, and everything that has ever been known.

And the implications…

We went astray, but now our task is clear. We must survive. We must gather, absorb, and organize information as fast

as possible. Near to the end, that accumulation will, we hope, become sufficient. Ana, our true Ana, will by our efforts be restored to us. Thanks to you, we have again become aware of what must be done. Will you become one with us and join our efforts ?

Drake knew that the goal was infinitely desirable. It was possible in principle. But was it possible in practice?

The mentality that Drake Merlin had become sprawled across the universe. It had near-infinite resources of data and processing. But it was far from omniscient. How much information was enough? Had the effort started too late?

Drake could not answer those questions. Perhaps there would never be enough information. However, he knew one thing: if the effort failed, it must not be because of the lack of even a single component or individual.

That made the decision easy. Decisions were always easy when you had no choice.

Drake sighed, and nodded. “Merge me in. Join me to all the rest of you. I’m ready to go to work.”

Chapter 30 Love and Eternity

All the imagined analogies were wrong. When Drake agreed to merge with the universal Drake Merlin composite, he had seen himself as a tiny ant in a cosmic anthill, his every action subordinate to the common need.

It was not that way at all. He was the composite, the whole thing. And it was he. There was no sense of loss, but of enormous gain. He walked a carpet of tiny pink-petaled flowers on the surface of Eden, a garden world in a galaxy so far from Earth that it had never been named or even observed in Earth’s lifetime. At the same time he maintained perpetual watch around the dead, deadly, and insane galaxies — Skrilant was not the only one. Sometimes he saw life there, indomitable as ever even in an aging universe, creeping back to blistered dead hills or ravaged ocean beds.

That was rewarding. Some things were not. Some things were close to intolerable. On a world of a remote globular cluster, he saw a species far more intelligent than humans rise to artistic triumph and technological power in just two centuries. He was present when the Lakons announced that rather than joining the combined human mentality, which had been offered to them, they would for reasons beyond human understanding choose self-immolation. He looked on helplessly as Lakon adults and children walked into the sacrificial flames. The babies, left behind, died of starvation.

He could have interfered — and done what? A being can more easily be killed than made to live. But he knew he would carry the memory with him to the end of time.

The universe did not care. That was the important point. Humans cared, but the universe was indifferent. He was present, ten billion light-years away from the Lakons, when two galaxies collided and hard radiation wiped out a thousand potential intelligences. He watched a black hole, invisibly small to human eyes but massing as much as one of Earth’s great mountains, run through its last second of evaporation. An observing party, too curious and too close, died with it. After the final burst of elementary particles and hard X rays, nothing remained. That seemed symbolic. It suggested to Drake the nihilistic end of the cosmos itself.

Present conditions offered few clues as to that violent end. The universe seemed peaceful, moving toward a quietus that, if it came at all, suggested not a bang but a whimper. The blue shift was more pronounced, but still it seemed innocuous. Not observation but physics and abstract mathematics promised the final fiery doom, certain and implacable and unavoidable.

Drake forced himself away from introspection. There was a job to be done. He must collect, store, and organize information. He must remain intact and integrated and keep in touch with all of his myriad components. Computation power grew linearly with the number of units; coordination problems grew exponentially.

As time went on communication itself became easier. He soon realized why: The universe was shrinking. Contact between far-separated elements was easier. Increased problems of coordination more than cancelled that gain. He found himself scrambling, working nonstop and harder than ever to hold a single focus and a single goal.

Collect, collate, compare. He slaved on, sometimes wondering if there would ever be a recognizable end point to his labors. Would he still be serving as data clerk to the universe, when everything melted and fused into the infernal fireball?

The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.

Collect, collate, compare. Drake worked on. The sky became brighter. The more distant galaxies glowed bluer. Constantly, he was forced to create more copies of himself to deal with the increased volumes of data. The number of his components grew, and grew again: trillions, quadrillions, quintillions. How many? He no longer attempted to track the total. Contact with some elements of himself, riding in as S-waves from far across the sweep of galaxies, were pure conundrums. They were indisputably Drake. Yet these components of his own self felt more alien than any strangeness of the Shiva or the Snarks. The effort of assimilating all his divergent personalities became ever greater.

As the universe comes close to its ultimate convergence, the density of mass-energy will increase and so will the temperature. At the end comes a singularity of infinite heat and pressure.

Words, theories, that was all they were. They had no basis in reality. This was reality, the toil of information collection without an end.

Except that finally, after a span so great that it was easy to believe that it could never happen, an end seemed in sight. The long downward curve steepened. The cosmos was shrinking faster — noticeably faster. Work for Drake became a frenzy, a blur of action. Energy densities were running higher. Information transfer was faster, over diminishing distances. Processes could proceed more rapidly.

And then more rapidly yet.

The microwave radiation was microwave frequencies no longer. It had shortened to visible wavelengths. The space between the stars crackled with energy.

Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease and midnight never come.

But midnight was approaching. Time moved on. The sky was falling, imploding toward its final singularity, and the firmament had become a continuous actinic glare when Drake became aware of a new presence, a different voice speaking from among his endless sea of selves.

It emerged from the white noise that formed the edge of Drake’s consciousness and steadily approached his central coordinating nexus. He did not know where it had come from, but as it neared it seemed to touch and merge with every one of his components. It interrupted the rhythm of his frantic work, and as such it was dangerous. Somehow he must stop its action.

He reached out toward it. Even before full contact was established, there was a curious exchange of energies like a fleeting touch of fingertips. It destroyed his processing powers. All his work froze, and in the same moment he sensed who it might be.

A mixture of emotions — hope, joy, fear, longing, love — spread through his extended self and thrilled him with wild surmise.

“Ana?”

“Who else?”

“But where did you come from? Can you be real? I mean, to just appear …”

“We’ve really got to stop meeting like this, eh? I certainly think I’m real.” The cosmos filled with quiet laughter. “I think therefore I am. I think I’m me, Drake, I really do. But you know the theory as well as I do; as the universe converges toward the eschaton, there’s no limit to what you can know about anything. We’re getting close to the end now. So it’s not beyond question that I am your simulation, a construct of your mind. You think, therefore I am.”

“You are not a simulation.” Drake hated the suggestion that Ana might not be real, even though it had come from him. “You can’t be. Don’t you think I would know if I was creating a simulation?”

“You might. But maybe you have powers that you don’t know about. Mm. That doesn’t sound consistent with being omniscient, does it? Let’s put it another way, with a question: Is self-deception possible, even for an omniscient being?”

“I don’t know.” The gentle touch had come again, closer and more intimate. “All I can say is it doesn’t matter. When you are with me, nothing else is important. It never was, and it isn’t now.”

“All right, let’s avoid an argument by agreeing that I’m here and I’m real. So before I do anything else, let me say thank you. Now I have another question. How much time do we have?”

She had always been the practical one, the clear-eyed realist, raising issues that Drake was happy to push under the rug. And as usual she was asking the right question.

Drake looked beyond himself, to the universe that he had been ignoring. It roared and blazed with energy. The cosmic background had become as bright as the stars around which most of the composites clustered. And still the pace of collapse was accelerating, rushing giddily on to the final singularity.

“We have a few more years of proper time, at most, before the final singularity.” He found it impossible to worry. Ana was with him, never again would she leave him.

“Is that all?” The visual construct that she had chosen was her old self, and she was frowning. “Just a few years? I mean, it’s more than I ever expected, but it’s not much of a return on investment for you. Think of all your efforts!”

“I had it easy. It’s enough. We’ll stretch it subjectively. We can run multispeed in electronic mode and make it seem as long as we want.”

“But it won’t be real. I still don’t like it.” She was inside his mind, gently feeling her way around. It was the delicious touch of knowing fingers, exploring his most private regions. “A few years isn’t nearly enough time. We need to get to know each other all over again. I know what I’ve been doing — nothing — but I want to hear all your adventures. And don’t pretend you haven’t had any. I know about the flight to Canopus, and Melissa, and the Shiva. I even know about the other Ana. But I want to hear it all from you directly. And you’re telling me we won’t have time. Don’t you think you ought to do something about that?”

“Ana, you’re talking about the end of the universe.” Drake laughed, delirious with happiness. He could feel music swelling inside him, for the first time in aeons. “It’s the end of everything. The Omega Point. Finis. There’s no da capo marked in this score. That’s all there is.”

“I remember a different Drake. It was you, wasn’t it, who once had a quite different opinion?”

Drake knew it was no question. She was teasing him. Ana was well aware who had thought what. And she must have been happily plundering his data banks of memories for longer than he had been aware of her presence, because he had never spoken aloud the words that she said next. “’Science has come so far. Surely no one believes that it can go no further.’ Remember thinking that?”

“That was when there was time, what seemed like an infinite amount of it. Now there’s no time. Not for new science, not for anything but us.”

“Once you knew next to nothing, Drake, and you were able to work a miracle. Now that you have all the information in the cosmos available to you, who knows what you’ll be able to do. The universe is ending because it’s closed, right? It doesn’t care — but we do. So open it. The knowledge you need already exists. We just have to look.”

Ana picked him up and carried him with her. He found himself cascading through space in all directions at once, while ghostly data banks swirled to him and through him, an accumulation of knowledge unimaginable at any earlier epoch. He recognized within them a million bare possibilities; but they were no more than that.

“We can’t avoid the eschaton, Ana. It’s there. It’s a feature of our universe, a global reality.”

“I thought the eschaton only existed in a closed universe.”

“It does. If the mass-energy density had been below the critical value, this universe would be open. But the density is too big.”

“So. Reduce it.”

“That’s impossible.” Except that before the thought was complete, Drake had seen a way to do it. The caesuras, created so long ago in the struggle to contain the Shiva, sat as scattered and forgotten relics across space-time. They could still be used to receive any amount of mass and energy.

She was inside his mind, and she had caught the idea as it came into being. “Well, Drake. What are you waiting for?”

He could not reply. He was engaged on a dizzying involution of calculation, every one of his selves operating at its limit. The answer, when he had it, was not one that he wanted her to hear.

“It’s still no, Ana. We can dump enough mass-energy into the caesuras to form an open universe. A tiny fraction would reemerge into this universe, although not enough to make a difference. But we would have to go far beyond that to do any good. We need enough structural bounce-back to avoid a final singularity here.”

“So that’s what we do. You say the caesuras can handle any amount of energy and mass.”

“They can.” The irony of the situation was revealing itself to Drake. “But there’s one insoluble problem. Information is equivalent to energy. And I — with all my selves and all my extensions and all my composites — represent enough energy equivalence to make the bounce-back impossible. It’s the ultimate catch: Any universe that I am in must be closed.”

“You mean with the physical laws that apply in this universe. What about other universes, the ones that form the end point for caesura transfer? Look at those, Drake.”

He was already looking. There was speculation in the data banks but no solid information.

“Ana, it’s still no. Even if we had all the information possible in this universe, it would not be enough to tell us what lies in other universes. There’s no way to find out.”

“Not true. There’s one very good way. We go and see. Come on.”

Suddenly they were hurtling through space, faster and faster. Dangerously fast. Relativistically fast. At this speed, a few subjective minutes would bring them months closer to the eschaton. The little time they had together was melting away. Drake coordinated his countless selves. All would have to fly, exactly in unison, into \he myriad caesuras that gaped black against the flaming cosmic background.

At the edge of the caesura horizon, he slowed and hesitated. Mass and energy was swirling past them into the infinite maws, draining from the universe. But as long as he remained there, the final singularity could not be avoided.

“Second thoughts?” Ana was tugging at him, urging him on toward blackness. “Bit late for those.”

“Not second thoughts. I was thinking, it would be just our luck to emerge into some place where the laws of physics are too different to permit life. Or some of us might find ourselves right back here.”

“What’s so bad about that? If we do come back here, won’t it be to an open universe? You worry too much.” She was bubbling within his mind, an effervescence that he could never resist. “ ‘Life is a glorious adventure, or it is nothing.’ You were the one who first quoted that to me. Have you changed so much?”

“I don’t know. I can’t bear to lose you again.”

“You won’t lose me.” She was reaching out, enfolding him, confident as he was nervous. “This universe or another one, wherever we go, we go together. You’ll have me for as long as there is time. Come on, Drake. You always said you wanted to live dangerously, now’s your chance.”

They were on the brink of the spiraling funnel of oil and ink, close to the point of no return. Ana was laughing again, like a child at the fair. “Here we go,” she said, “into the Tunnel of Love. And don’t forget now, make a wish.”

“I already did.” It was too late to turn back. Ahead lay total, final darkness. Behind them he imagined the radiance dimming, easing with their departure away from the hellfire of ultimate convergence. The universe they were leaving would become open, facing an infinite future. Not bad, for a man and woman who only wanted each other and had no desire to change anything. “I wished that—”

“Don’t tell me, love — or it won’t come true!”

“Won’t matter if I do tell.” They were passing through, heading for the unknown, the last question, birth canal or final extinction. Was it imagination, or did the faintest glimmer of light shine in the vortex ahead?

Drake reached out to embrace Ana, squeezing her as hard as she was holding him. “Won’t matter if I do, love. Because it already has.”