Wall Around a Star

TWENTY-ONE

Dr. Jensen Babylon slowly raised the supple helmet from his head and looked about him. He was standing on a shell of hard, dark crystal, and far beneath him a sun hung in a glowing cloud of plasma, tiny and remote. Its fire was filtered by that dark crystal floor, so that he could see its sharp-rimmed disk, a little smaller than Sol's, pocked with twin, diverging rows of small, dark sunspots.

Nearer to hand were the trashed and reeking remnants of the struggle that had come before. The dark crystal was smeared with blood. The hot air bore a slaughterhouse stench of alien chemistries in destruction. The carnage went all the way to the far wall, bodies, bits of equipment, a great translucent object surrounded by corpses.

"Dr. Babylon," whispered a small voice in his ear. "Jen! What has happened to you?"

Babylon turned and saw Doc Chimp, arms wrapped around a gaunt steel pillar, just behind him. The black shoe-button eyes were not fearful but they were wondering. Wondering as they stared at Jen, wondering as they flicked to the corpses, as they fastened on the distant discarded rubble. "I don't know, Doc," Babylon said simply. "I'm dif­ferent."

"Is it that helmet? Has it—done something to you?"

Babylon nodded, gazing around. A titanic battle had been fought here, and the overpowering beetle stink of Watchers told what one side had been. The other, perhaps those shattered crystal crustaceanlike things, their bodies mixed in with the hard-armored corpses of the Watchers themselves. "It's more than the helmet, Doc," he said som­berly. "I don't know what it is, but I can see things that were hidden before, and what I can see most clearly—" He hesitated and frowned. "I see that the greatest is yet to come," he finished. "We are in the presence of something very large."

A slow twittering from his other side told him the T'Worlie was still there, too. "Concurrence," it chirped, tone solemn. "Hypothesis: Presence is central conscious­ness of Cuckoo."

There was a gasp from Doc Chimp, and a quick, muf­fled exchange between him and the T'Worlie. Babylon hardly heard them. He was immersed in the wonder of his new knowledge. Taking the hood off had not taken away his immense new persona. Its forces had changed him, and he knew that the change was forever. He could hear Doc Chimp and the T'Worlie. He could see the laser-seared and dismembered bodies that lay about. He was aware that the little ape had said something very important, and then bounded away.

But his attention was taken up by the enormous, ex­panded perceptions that surrounded him.

He knew that something vastly important was about to happen, very soon. Yet he was not anxious or apprehen­sive. The forces that had expanded him had also made him hugely more quick; and so there was time.

There was time for him to perceive what lay about him. He saw that not all the motionless crystal crabs were de­stroyed; many of them were" crushed and broken, but far the greater number were simply frozen, waiting for orders from that being who owned them. He saw that there were other players in this great drama, and all of them, too, still waiting for their cues. He saw the battered Scorpian robot that lay crushed and immobile halfway along the trail of carnage, rattling helplessly to itself in a complaining grum­ble. He saw Zara Doy, with the kobold boy clutched fiercely to her breast, staring up at him in fear and hope, and the weary orgs that waited impatiently to be fed or ridden or set free. He saw a cloud of Boaty-Bits that danced in a dense swarm, waiting for the will of their mas­ter; and everything he saw interlocked with all the rest. He perceived the patterns and the roots. He did not only see. He comprehended. Far away he saw a bounding figure, tiny as a flea in the distance, and knew that it was Doc Chimp following the trail of destruction—and knew what errand he was on.

And urgent as all that was, he took time to wonder at the whole mystery of Cuckoo,- now revealed to him entire. Not merely an artifact. A machine. Powered by hydrogen fusing into helium at the core of its sun; the energies turned into radiation, then trapped and redirected by the structures on the interior of its shell. Stellar energy fed those huge devices at the poles, ion-thrusters that had hurled Cuckoo out of its home galaxy and would halt it at its destination. Stellar energy cooled the great ice caves where frozen bits of organic matter slept, waiting to be thawed and born again to populate new planets in the new starcloud. Stellar energy powered the great machine-mind that had overseen the workings of Cuckoo while its master slept, that had sent emissaries to all the planets of the new galaxy and sampled all its worlds—and was now silent. Stellar energy had powered those great, eternal monatomic rings, so that their centrifugal force held the great shell suspended and prevented it from collapsing into its central sun. All this Jen Babylon saw and understood.

And, out of nowhere or out of the air around him, sourceless and irresistible, a great voice sounded in his ear: "now you know almost all."

He turned, and froze. The cluster of Boaty-Bits had shaped themselves into a huge, winged, three-eyed form, facing him, while another cloud of them danced toward him. As they settled on his body, his face, his eyes, the voice spoke again: "now know me."

And he knew, and the pain of that terrible knowledge was almost too much to bear.

A galaxy far away—a little older than the one that shel­tered Earth. Not very different. Not different in the way in which all galaxies were alike, for it was destroying itself.

All galaxies destroy themselves in the end, because the random movement of mass sooner or later produces con­centrations at the core. A sort of critical mass. A knot in space-time. Sometimes it is called a black hole, sometimes a Seyfert galaxy; there are countless millions of them in the sky, and each one is the agony of a billion suns.

Within that far-away galaxy were myriad inhabited worlds, old and wise or still straining toward the awakening of intelligence. All doomed; but in some of them, the oldest and wisest few, the knowledge of that doom came to exist.

They were very wise, and they had time. The frightful fires at the core of their galaxy reached out toward all its worlds—but slowly, no faster than the crawl of light it­self—while they had the tachyons to reach around to all their worlds, and in time the zero-mass tachyons. For a tachyon is brother to the photon. The closer to the speed of light it travels, the more its mass. The less its mass, the farther from c its velocity. For a zero-mass photon, there is no energy, no motion. But for a zero-mass tachyon . . . the speed is infinite.

So they reached out to the neighboring galaxies to find a haven. They built an ark to flee in. And they peopled the ark. Specimens of every sapient race, frozen in liquid- helium baths to be revived when there were safe homes for them again. Memories of all the collective wisdom of their cultures, organized into a vast computer store, to ran the ark and protect it. Those were the passengers and the crew. And for the captain . . .

For the captain they planned and bred a race that could free itself from flesh and live on; that could fuse and take into itself all of the other intelligences of the galaxy and make use of them; that could rest for" many millennia, and then awaken again to carry out their plan.

And then, as the deadly radiation flooded over their homes, they died ... or died in some parts of themselves, while other parts lived on—

In HIM. And the great ark, or egg, was launched on its immense journey.

And all this Jen Babylon knew, and then the steel-blue creatures fell away from him, and he could see again with his own eyes, and the vast voice spoke once more: "now you know me. now know what you must en­dure."

And Jen Babylon, with all the strength he owned, shouted: "No!"

There was a pause, while the dense swarm of Boaty-Bits moved about within the confines of the shape they had assumed, and the galactic beings drew back, terrified spec­tators at the huge debate. Then the Overmind spoke: "you must. i do not come to conquer, but to save. your galaxy too is doomed, and already the fires are flashing at its core."

And the images flooded into Babylon's mind, of the vast press of matter at the heart of his own Galaxy, now inexor­ably beginning its long, irresistible explosion. That which was human in Jen Babylon was terrified, as much by the insupportable feeling of responsibility as by the frightening knowledge itself. Yet he did not let the fear overcome him. Steadfastly he cried: "Even so—no!"

And the battle for the billion worlds was joined.