Wall Around a Star

NINETEEN

And now my mission is near its end, for HE is wak­ing.

The great machine stirs in all its hidden places, and re­ports to me. Even the parts that have lain silent for all the thousands of centuries now are commanded to life, and they respond. The desecrators who forced the new intru­sion into HIS sacred fabric have been dealt with, and once more the masterwork that is HIS body has proven invulner­able, even to nuclear attack. As HE constructed it to be.

Now at last HIS vast design fulfills itself.

The guardians of the frozen crypts move and wake, and send out their sensors. First to their organic charges: Are they safe? Have any suffered damage? Need they clone new samples for the store? Then they reach out to HIM for instructions. There are none yet. But they will not be long in coming.

The custodians of the great driving jets at the poles wake. They check their plasma reserves and test their power charges and their controls. It is not yet time for them, but they are ready. When they are needed they will guide our great machine-egg into its fresh galactic nest.

And I am ready—ready to end the long, lonely watch over the great round machine and all its myriad tenants and parts.

I reach out to all my sleeping members. They have rested, blind and uncaring, in the bubbles of a thousand separate memory stores, for the thousands and thousands of years since they were themselves alive, before they be­came, like me, charged particles dancing about the inter­faces of the immense machine.

Was I once, like them, alive? I cannot remember.

But they were! And what things they were, back in the home galaxy, before HE was born out of the need to flee its fires. Great gray starfish from the ammonia slime of seas that never saw their sun. Ethereal wisps of gas clouds that needed no star. Creatures like insects and creatures like rocks, creatures of all shapes and chemistries; crea­tures that were old when HE was only a theory, and crea­tines that HE planned and bred and nursed to ripeness in a spiral arm, even when the galactic core was exploding and the central stars were being devoured by the tens of mil­lions.

And then they, too, were devoured . . .

As I am about to be devoured . . .

For HE is awake now, and come into HIS glory, and I—I cease to exist—

EXCEPT AS PART OF HIM.