PART ONE

To follow knowledge like a sinking star.

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I

The story is of a man, a woman, and a world. But ghosts pass through it, and gods. Time does, which is more mysterious than any of these.

A boy stood on a hilltop and looked skyward. The breeze around him was a little cold, as if it whispered of the spaces yonder. He kept his parka hood up. Gloves didn’t make his fingers too clumsy for the telescope he had carried here. Already now, before the autumnal equinox, summer was dying out of the Tanana valley and the nights lengthening fast. Some warmth did linger in the forest that enclosed this bare height: he caught a last faint fragrance of spruce.

The dark reached brilliant above him, the Milky Way cleaving it with frost, the Great Bear canted and Capella outshining Polaris in the north, ruddy Arcturus and Altair flanking steely Vega in the west, a bewilderment of stars. Though the moon was down, treetops lifted gray beneath their light.

A spark rose among them, a satellite in a high-inclination orbit. The boy’s gaze followed it till it vanished. Longing shook him. To be out there!

He would. Someday he would.

Meanwhile he had this much heaven. Best get started. He must flit back home at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow his school gyroball team was having practice, he wanted to work out a few more Fourier series-if you just told the computer to do it, you’d never learn what went on-and in the evening he’d take a certain girl to a dance. Maybe afterward he’d have nerve enough to recite her a poem he’d written about her. He hastily postponed that thought.

His astronomical pursuits had gone well past the usual sights. This time he savored their glories only briefly, for he was after a couple of Messier objects. There was no need to spoil the adaptation of his eyes. He spoke a catalogue number to the telescope mount. It found the RA and dec, pointed the instrument, and commenced tracking. He bent over the eyepiece and touched the knobs. Somehow it always felt better to focus for himself.

The thing swam into view, dim and misty. He hadn’t the power to resolve more than a hint of structure. But it wasn’t a nebula, it was a galaxy, the most remote he had yet tried for, suns in their tens of billions, their births and deaths, whirling neutron globes, unfathomable black holes, clouds of star-stuff, surely planets and moons and comets, surely-oh, please-living creatures, maybe- who could say?-some that were gazing his way and wondering.

No. Stupid, the boy chided himself. It’s too far. How many light-years? I can’t quite remember.

He didn’t immediately ask for the figure. Down south he had seen the Andromeda glimmer awesome through six lunar diameters of arc, and it was a couple of million off. Here he spied on another geological era.

No, not even that. Lately he had added geology to his interests, and one day realized that magnolias were blooming on Earth when the Pleiades kindled. It strengthened his sense of the cosmos as a unity, where he too belonged. Well, that star cluster was only about a hundred parsecs away. (Only!) It was not altogether ridiculous to imagine what might be going on there as you watched, three and a quarter centuries after the light now in your eyes had departed it. But across gulfs far less deep than this that confronted him, simultaneity had no meaning whatsoever. His wistfulness to know if any spirit so distant shared his lifetime would never be quenched. It could not be.

The night chill seemed to flow through aperture and lens into him. He shivered, straightened, glanced around in a sudden, irrational search for reassurance.

Air tingled through his nostrils. Blood pulsed. The forest stood tall from horizon to horizon. Another satellite skittered low above it. An owl hooted.

The ground stayed firm beneath his feet. A nearby boulder, weathered, probably glacier-scarred, bore the same witness to abidingness. If human science asked its age, the answer would be as real as the stone.

We’re not little bits of nothing, the boy thought half defiantly. We count too. Our sun is a third as old as the universe. Earth isn’t much younger. Life on Earth isn’t much younger than that. And we have learned this all by ourselves.

The silence of the stars replied: You have measured it. Do you understand it? Can you?

We can think it, he declared. We can speak it. Can you?

Why did the night seem to wait?

Oh, yes, he thought, we don’t see or feel it the way we do what’s right around us. If I try to picture bricks or something side by side, my limit is about half a dozen. If I’d been counting since I was born and kept on till I died, I wouldn’t get as high as twenty billion. But I reason. I imagine. That’s enough.

He had always had a good head for figures. He could scale them down till they lay in his mind like pebbles in his hand. Even those astrophysical ages-No, maybe it didn’t make sense either, harking clear back to the quantum creation. Too much that was too strange had happened too fast. But afterward time must have run for the first of the stars as it did for him. The chronology of life was perfectly straightforward.

Not that it had an exact zero point. The traces were too faint. Besides, most likely there wasn’t any such moment. Chemistry evolved, with no stage at which you could say this had come alive. Still, animate matter certainly existed sometime between three and a half and four billion years ago.

The boy’s mind jumped, as if a meteor had startled him. Let’s split the difference and call the date three-point-six-five billion B.C.E., he thought. Then one day stands for ten million years. Life began when January the first did, and this is midnight December the thirty-first, the stroke of the next new year.

So ... along about April, single cells developed, nuclei, ribosomes, and the rest. The cells got together, algae broke oxygen free into the atmosphere, and by November the first trilobites were crawling over the sea floor. Life invaded the land around Thanksgiving. The dinosaurs appeared early in December. They perished on Christmas Day. The hominids parted company with the apes at noon today. Primitive Homo sapiens showed up maybe fifteen minutes ago. Recorded history had lasted less than one minute. And here they were, measuring the universe, ranging the Solar System, planning missions to the stars.

Where will we be by sunrise? he wondered for a dizzying moment.

It passed. The upward steepness was an illusion, he knew. To go from worm to fish took immensely longer than to go from fish to mammal because the changes were immensely greater. By comparison, an ancient insectivore was very like an ape, and an ape nearly identical with a human.

Just the same, the boy thought, we’ve become a force of nature, and not only on this world. It’s never seen anything like us before. Our little piece of extra brain tissue has got to have taken us across a threshold.

But what threshold, and what’s beyond it?

He shivered again, pushed the question away from him, and turned back to his stargazing.

II

Strictly speaking, he was mistaken. In no particular was humankind unique. Nearly all animals had language, in the sense of communication between each other; among some, parts of it were learned, not innate, and actual dialects could develop. Many were technologists, in the sense of constructing things. A few used tools, in the sense of employing foreign objects for special tasks. A very few made tools, in the sense of slightly reshaping the objects; three or four species did this with the help of something besides their own mouths or digits.

Yet none came near to humans in any of these ways. In no other lineage did language grow so rich and powerful, for in them it sprang from an unprecedented capability of abstraction and reason. They had been toolmasters par excellence since before they were fully human; fire, chipped stone, and cut wood became conditions of their further evolution. At last the scope of their technology was such that natural selection no longer had significant effect on them. Like social insects and various sea dwellers, they were so well fitted to their surroundings that they bade fair to continue unaltered for millions of years. In their case, however, they themselves created- or were-their own environment. We can, if we like, say they had crossed a threshold.

Then we must say that another, more fateful one lay ahead.

For technology was never static. It continued to develop, at an ever more furious pace. Technological evolution was radically different from biological. It was not Darwinian, driven by contingency, competition, and a blind urge to reproduce. It was Lamarckian, driven by purpose. Its units of inheritance were not genes but memes-ideas, concepts, deliberately mutated or kept intact according to needs foreseen.

Knowledge also grew, in a fashion more nearly organic and haphazard until technology made science, the systematic search for verifiable information, possible. Thereafter the two nourished one another and the pace accelerated further.

More and more it was as though technology took on a life of its own, acting independently and ruthlessly. Gunpowder brought whole societies down. The steam engine forced basic change upon whole civilizations. Its internal-combustion successor turned the planet into a single quarrelsome neighborhood, while powering an agriculture that fed billions but starved what was left of the natural world. Computers remade industry, economics, and the everyday well-nigh beyond recognition, undermined liberty, and opened a road to space. The Internet, founded as a link between military centers, spread across the globe in a matter of years, revolutionized communication and access to knowledge like nothing since movable type, curbed tyrannies, and vexed governments everywhere. Automation made traditional skills useless, raising resentment and despair side by side with new wealth and new hopes.

”Artificial intelligence” was the name given the qualities of the most advanced systems. Certain of these went into the business of enhancing artificial intelligence. Soon the business was entirely theirs.

The boy became a man. For a while he adventured on Earth, then he went into space as he had dreamed.

The machines evolved onward.

III

Long after-ward-almost unimaginably long afterward-Christian Brannock recalled that day. For it had been somehow both an ending and a beginning.

He did not see this until he looked back on his life and his afterlife in fullness. At the time, he was wholly caught up in the there and then. It was not even day, except by a clock set to North American hours; and at the moment Earth was some hundred million kilometers to starward, while night still lay over Clement Base.

Morning approached, but slowly. Between sunrise and sunrise, 176 terrestrial rotations passed. Not that the men here had ever gazed directly at a sunlit landscape on Mercury. Though a darkened pane might bring the brightness down to something endurable, other radiation would strike through. Their machines above ground ranged for them. Most of these were robots, with different degrees of autonomy. One was more.

Gimmick never knew darkness. Across five hundred kilometers, Christian saw by laserlight, radarlight, amplified starlight. He felt with fingers and tendrils of metal, with sensors in the treads as the body rolled across the regolith, with subtle seismics. He tasted and smelled with flickery beams of electrons and nuclear particles. He listened electronically to whispers of radioactivity from the rock around and to the hiss and spatter of cosmic rain. Interior sensors kept him subliminally aware of balances, flows, needs, as nerves and glands did in his own body. Together, he and Gimmick made observations and decisions, like his brain alone in its skull; they moved the machine as his muscles moved himself.

Rapport was not total. It could only be so in line-of-sight. Relay, whether by satellite or by spires planted along the way, inevitably reduced the bandwidth and degraded the signal. Christian remained dimly conscious of his surroundings, the recliner in which he lay connected, meters and instruments, air odorless and a little chilly, tensions and casings-instinctive responses, which sometimes made him strain against his bonds. From the corner of an eye he glimpsed Willem Schuyten seated at a control console, monitoring what went on. That had seldom been necessary elsewhere, Christian thought vaguely. Or, at least, he’d avoided it. But this was a team effort, and on Mercury the unknowns were many and the stakes high.

It was just half a minute’s distraction, while Gimmick did some data analysis that he couldn’t follow. A certain direction of search seemed promising, and the explorer set off again. Christian’s whole attention returned to the scene.

Heaven glimmered and shimmered, its manifold brilliances arcing down to a horizon that on the left was near and sharp. Craters pocked the murky terrain, boulders lay strewn. When he glanced at any, he could tell its age within a few million years, as he could tell the age of a person or a tree on Earth; the clues were countless, the deductions subconscious. Close on the right a scarp four kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, loomed like a wall across the world. The enhancement that was Christian-Gimmick perceived it as more than rock. He noted traces as he went along; brain and computer joined to read the history, the tale of a gigantic upthrust along a fault line long ago when the planet was still cooling and shrinking after its birth.

He spied possibilities in something ahead.

Gimmick was following the cliff southwesterly, back toward the polar region where Clement waited. Rubble scrunched beneath the treads, soundlessly to human ears; dust smoked up and fell quickly down, under low gravity but unhindered by air. It did not cling to the robot, whose material repelled it.

There, Christian thought, that crag yonder. Maybe a good anchor point. We’ll have a look. The partnership veered slightly and trundled nearer the heights. Debris lay deep here. Shards slipped aside. Motors labored. He considered deploying the six legs but decided that wasn’t needful.

The peak sheered out of a lower slope above the rubble, a rough-edged hundred-meter obelisk. He had seen others as he traveled, though none so large. Probably shock-wave resonances in the age of uplift had split them from the massif.

He visualized this one as an almost ready-made core for a transmission tower, part of the global network that was to collect the solar energy cataracting down onto Mercury’s dayside and hurl it out to orbiting antimatter factories-ultimately, to the laser beams that would send the first starships on their way! Passion thrummed in him.

A quick structural exam. The self-robots can map the details later. A disc at the end of an arm snugged tightly. Vibrations through stone returned their echoes, bearing tales.

The stone gave way. Thunder and blindness crashed down.

2

”Wat drommel?” Willem Schuyten cried. He went back to the expedition’s English. “What the hell?” After a glance at the other man’s face: “Hell indeed.”

”N-no.” Secured in the system, Christian Brannock could neither lift a braceleted arm nor shake his helmeted head. His voice shuddered. “Hold on. Keep going. Let me try to find out-what’s happened-“

Willem nodded and concentrated on his instruments. Grown gray in the artificial intelligence field, he could make inferences from these readings and computations that might well escape an on-site observer.

Shards and tatters of input went through Christian like a nightmare, blackness, deafness, crushing heaviness, powers lost, strength in ebb. Instinct panicked; his flesh struggled against the restraints. But somehow his mind clung to the steadiness that was Gimmick’s. Together they tried to interpret what little the sensors gave them.

Those fitful moments of reality turned more and more chaotic. They weakened, too, until he could not make out whatever form they still had.

The linkage is failing fast. Better break it altogether and start work. Christian never knew whether the decision was his alone or rooted also in his partner’s calm logic. Nor did he know or care why it ended with: So long. Good luck.

”Terminate,” he rasped aloud.

”Terminate,” Willem repeated. He swept a glance and a judgment across the gauges, deemed that an immediate breakoff was neurologically safe, and pressed the command button. Voice-activated, the communication center could have done everything by itself, but a human in the loop was an added precaution. He could better tell what another human required.

All channels shut down. The neuroconnectors released Christian. He lay for a minute breathing hard, then sat up. Willem stood above him with a tumbler of water. Christian drained it in two gulps. “Thanks,” he mumbled. “Dry as yon landscape, my mouth was.”

”Terror will do that,” his companion replied. “I saw your involuntary reactions. Want a levozine?”

Christian half grinned, without merriment. “What I really want is a stiff drink. But we’re in a hurry. Yes, I’ll take a pill.”

Willem gave him one. Some was always on hand, in case a mission got unexpectedly long or difficult and the operator could not stop to rest. “In a hurry, you said? Do you mean there is something we can do at once?”

Christian nodded. “We’d bloody well better.” He climbed to his feet. The medication began to tranquilize and stimulate. His trembling died away, his voice gained force. “Whew! Hope I can snatch a shower during preparations. I smell six weeks dead, don’t I?” Sweat sheened on his skin and darkened his shirt.

Willem regarded him narrowly. “My monitors say the machine is a ruin. The transceiver’s badly damaged. It can carry some information, erratically, but the power unit’s out of commission. Anything that could perhaps function, like an arm, can’t anymore. And the energy reserve is dwindling fast.”

”Gimmick’s intact.”

Willem sighed. “Yes, evidently. That hurts, doesn’t it?” He had often heard such highly developed computers and neural nets, with their programs and databases, called “brains.” People who worked with one, like Christian-although seldom as intimately as he did-were apt to give it a name and speak of its personal quirks, as other people might speak of a ship or a tool that had served them a long time. “I imagine you’d prefer the wreck to have been quick and total. Merciful, so to speak. That would have been a shock to you, however, worse than you got.”

”I know. Like suddenly dying myself. I’d have recovered. But this way-My God, man, Gimmick’s out there, not a heap of smashed parts but Gimmick! And sunrise is coming.”

Willem sighed. “Exactly. Have you any idea what happened?”

The question, its style carefully parched, demanded an answer in kind. Christian’s fists unclenched. “We were examining an unusual sort of crag. All at once it broke into huge chunks. It buried Gimmick.” His tone sharpened. “The body Gimmick was using.” Again impersonal: “The top of the transceiver mast, with the dish, is sticking out, and what came to me shows that the interior armor protected the brain.”

”Are you sure? It could be in poor shape too.”

Christian shook his head. “No. Do you believe I wouldn’t know that, feel it, same as I would if my own brain took a concussion?”

”All right. But the accident-how could a collapse happen? An earthquake?”

”No.” Christian spoke with certainty. He had, in a way, been there. “Nor a meteorite strike. Somehow our seismic probe must have touched things off. I don’t see how. You know it didn’t have any great force. And, and Mercury’s geologically used up. That jut of rock stood unchanged for-what?-three billion years?”

”A freak occurrence, then.”

”Maybe. Or maybe such formations and weaknesses are common. How much do we know? Why the devil are we on Mercury, except to get the lay of the land? Before something like this happens elsewhere-“

Christian drew breath and forced coolness upon himself. “I was only in linkage with Gimmick. The full information isn’t in me, it’s in his database. If we don’t retrieve him before sunrise, everything will be baked and blasted to nothing.”

”I suppose so. Thermostatic system destroyed and the rocks probably not a good replacement for smashed radiation shielding.” Willem laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Dreadful luck. Worse for you than the expedition, perhaps. This association you’ve grown used to, this particular rapport you’ve developed, gone. You’ll have to start all over, won’t you?” He regarded the creases in the face, the fallowness in the blond hair. “Unless you choose to make a career change, or just retire. I’m sorry, Christian.”

The response lashed at him: “No! There’s time to go dig, detach Gimmick from the wreckage, get back here. But we’ve got to move, I tell you!”

”I ... am afraid not. Let me check and make sure.” Willem turned to his keyboards and readouts. Christian stood where he was. His fists doubled again.

After a while the cyberneticist looked at him and said slowly:

”No. I’ve gathered the present whereabouts of everything we have with proper capability,” self-programming robots surveying and studying the planet in advance of the grand enterprise. Christian’s had been the only direct human-machine alliance, expensive in terms of life support and equipment, rewarding in terms of special situations calling for an organic mind on the scene. “They’re scattered across the globe, remember. Even the nearest has rough terrain to cross. None can get there soon enough.”

Christian had become quite composed. “I guessed so. Well, it isn’t too far from here. I’ll go myself.”

3

Everyone else at Clement called the idea insane. The central artificial intelligence made a lightning-quick calculation and agreed. No possible gain was worth the risk of losing the outfit necessary, let alone a human life. Commander Gupta forbade it.

Christian Brannock stood his ground. He and Gimmick had been doing work impossible for any single man or machine. The delay while a replacement was found and brought to the planet, then the time spent regaining the lost information, could possibly cripple the whole undertaking, if only by the added cost. More to the point, as .in independent contractor he had broad discretion. Within limits that he insisted he was not exceeding, he could commandeer whatever he needed to cope with an emergency.

His haste and resolution overbore them. Two hours later he was on his way.

After that, he waited. The rover that carried him operated itself. Its program included a topographic map, and survey satellites provided exact detail. Following its progress through communication relays, from time to time the intelligence at base ordered a change of course that would make for better speed. None of this impinged directly on Christian. Nor could he talk with the robot that accompanied him. It was built for power and dexterity, not thought. When they reached the site, the intelligence would direct its operations. Meanwhile its bulk crowded a cabin intended for, at most, three men.

Otherwise he was fairly comfortable. Air blew recycled, always pure. (He remembered odors of blossoms, pines, a woman’s sunlit hair.) Temperature varied subtly because that was best for health and alertness, without regard to the hundred-Kelvin cold of midnight or the searing three hundred Celsius degrees of noonday. (He remembered a beach where surf burst and roared, a wind chill in his face and salt on his lips but warmth radiant from a leeward bluff.) The metal around him hummed and quivered, the deck underfoot pitched and swayed, as the vehicle drove full tilt across a rugged land. However, the seat in which he sat harnessed compensated for most, and what it could not entirely counteract didn’t amount to much in Mercurian gravity. If anything, the motion soothed, almost cradle like. (He remembered a boat heeled over, climbing the crests of waves and diving into their troughs, the tiller athrum beneath his hand, the mainsail a snowpeak against heaven.)

Exhaustion claimed him. He ate and drank something, reclined the seat, and slept. His dreams were uneasy. Once during them he asked Gimmick, “Do you ever dream? When we’re not linked, I mean,” and the robot replied, “You taught me how.” Or was that a confused memory? They’d been together quite a few years, in quite a few strange places.

He woke refreshed, though, unharnessed, balanced himself against the lurching while he stretched his muscles and used the sanitor, ate more of the cold rations, and settled back down. When he called for a revised estimate of arrival time, the vehicle said “About another three hours” in its flat voice.

He frowned. That wouldn’t be long before sunrise. Well, he’d known when he started that this was the best he could hope for. And . . . the swollen solar disc would take fifteen hours to clear the horizon.

He looked outward. Direct vision was impossible when he sat in the middle of thick armor, but the electronics that he activated gave him a simulacrum as good. Suddenly it was as if everything above 1 he deck were gone and he directly beneath the sky, naked, alone, invulnerable. So might an angel have seen.

No, only a man. He did not now share the more than human senses of his partner. But for a while he lost himself in unaided vision.

A kind of dawn was breaking in the northeast, zodiacal light strengthened by the nearness of the sun. It lifted above rocks and craters like a huge wing, softly pearl-hued, a quarter of the way to the zenith before it faded among stars. The galactic belt outshone it, an ice-bright river from worldedge to worldedge. Everywhere else I he stars themselves gleamed and glittered, their thousands overwhelming the crystalline blackness behind. Though Christian had beheld them oftener than he could recall, for a moment he felt his spirit fall free, upward and upward forever into the majesty of their silence.

A glimpse drew him back. Low over a northwesterly ridge stood ii blue diamond. He could just espy a mote beside it, ashen-gold. Earth, he knew, and Earth’s moon. Home.

Did that moon tonight throw a glint off a bit of Ellen’s windborne dust?

Sometimes, without warning, the memory of her overtook him. He had long since healed himself of grief. There had been women before her; there had been women afterward. But she was the one for whom he left space and settled down to groundside engineering, because nothing was worth leaving her for months or years on end. When she died-robotic controls could not yet prevent every senseless accident-and he had scattered the contents of the urn across the countryside she loved, he returned to space. Their son was grown and didn’t need him any longer. He took up the new technology of human-machine linkage, and seldom came back for a visit. But from time to time he remembered, and it hurt.

Maybe, selfishly speaking, he was otherwise better off. Of course, he’d been happy to pay the price. Nevertheless, on Earth he had always felt trapped. The stars-

Again he looked aloft. A deeper longing shook him. He had fared and wrought across the Solar System. Beyond waited a universe.

Half angrily, he dismissed the emotion. Self-pity. They were going to the stars, yes, but it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, and they wouldn’t be flesh and blood, they would be machines. Oh, sentient, sensitive, bearing with them all the heritages of history, but not really human.

Her ghost lingered. It made the cabin too quiet.

He was not mawkish. In his job, he couldn’t be and survive. Yet you couldn’t survive either if you were a dullard. That meant you found ways to occupy long, empty stretches of time-not merely games and recorded shows, but anything from acquiring a language or mastering calligraphy to creating an artwork or maturing a philosophy. Christian Brannock was, among other things, a ballad singer who had composed several of his own.

He had taken his guitar along. The optics of total outervision obscured his immediate surroundings, but he knew where it was racked. He reached and pulled it free. Soundboard and strings glimmered into sight as he laid it over his lap. He struck a chord and began to sing.

”Once upon a hearth

We lit a little fire

To warm our winter hands

And kindle our desire,

Which never needed this;

But still, we found it good

To see the flames seduce

The dry and virgin wood.-“

No. The music clanged to a halt. He had made the song in his Earthside youth, later Ellen enjoyed it, a while ago he revived it on Mars, where no true flame had ever danced. Doing it here felt somehow wrong.

Why was he so churned up inside? Because he was in danger of losing Gimmick? But Gimmick was only a machine, wasn’t he- wasn’t it? Well, maybe not “only.” . . .

Christian had work to make ready for. Defiantly, he launched into something older and bawdier.

”Oh, a tinker came a-strolling,

A-strolling down the Strand-“

4

Already the solar corona was well over a ridge in the northeast. Its opalescent glory drowned the zodiacal light and cast a wan, shadowful glow across pocks and scars beneath. A crimson tongue of prominence heralded the oncoming disc. Elsewhere the stars still ruled. Earth no longer beckoned. The scarp blocked sight of it.

That cliff sheered from horizon to horizon, filling nearly half the sky. Christian remembered ledges, pinnacles, steeps, mineral streaks, the mark of meteorite strikes through billions of years. But he had seen those together with Gimmick. To his unaided eyes the heights were one vast darkness.

He might have imagined they were a storm front-on its own timescale the cosmos is neither enduring nor peaceful, it is appallingly violent-except that the wreckage on the rubble slope at the foot gripped his attention. His partner lay below that heap of broken stone. The communication disc poked above. He couldn’t make out exactly what damage it had suffered. Besides, lacking the necessary connectors, he was cut off from it. However, the intelligence back at Clement Base had no such limitations.

”Are you in touch?” he cried to it through the rover’s radio. “What can you tell us?”

The voice that replied was baritone. It could be in any register, always as vibrant and expressive as any human’s. “No more than formerly. The robot does not respond to calls. Evidently its own signals would be too feeble and distorted, and it doesn’t waste energy trying. Internal power is barely sufficient to maintain computational functions.”

In other words, Gimmick remains conscious, Christian said to himself. No, I’m being anthropomorphic. Which isn’t scientific, is it? “Does he know we’re here?”

”Possibly, through seismic or electronic traces.” The intelligence put a note of urgency into its calm. “Don’t delay if you want to save anything that matters.”

Christian thought of Gimmick lying prisoned, waiting either for rescue or death. Sensing? Hoping? So had many humans done, when an earthquake buried them alive or a disabled spacecraft went helpless off on trajectory. Was it altogether fantastic to suppose that Gimmick wanted to live?

”Right,” he said. “Take over the robot.” He hesitated. “Please.”

The big, half manlike thing stirred. It turned about and rumbled from the cabin. Christian heard its mass reach the crew-access air lock, then after a minute the hiss of pumps evacuating the chamber. He saw it go forth onto the surface, into the coronal luminance, stand for another minute while the intelligence at Clement studied the scene through its sensors, and start climbing the talus. Shards slipped from beneath its feet and slid downward. On Earth they would have rattled.

He couldn’t endure to sit and watch. His assigned part came toward the end, when he applied tools for which the robot was not designed. But the corona was creeping higher, the flame-tongue standing taller. Maybe his slight strength would make the slight difference that counted.

The intelligence perceived. “Don’t,” it warned. “You will hazard yourself more than enough according to plan.”

”I’m the captain here,” Christian flung back.

On the way out he stopped by a locker. From the geological gear stored there he took a pick and spade. At the lock he donned his spacesuit and went through his checklist with the almost mindless ruse of long practice. Almost mindless; one tiny malfunction or mistake could kill you. Machines were hardier. No wonder that it would be they who went to the stars. By now there weren’t too many uses for humans even on the planets.

Gear and all, he weighed less than he did unclad on Earth. Inertia was the same, of course, a combination that could get tricky.

He bounded across the ground to the detritus slope, but therefore picked his way with care. From the top he caught a chiaroscuro view of the rover, its metal partly shadowed, partly agleam under the waxing radiance. If you ignored details, it looked rather like a giant version of Gimmick’s body, minus the specialized limbs, detectors, and collection bins-an ovoid with a turret, legs currently folded while it rested on caterpillar treads, radiator fins deployed against the sun’s assault.

To hell with bodies. Gimmick had worn a lot of different bodies. What needed saving was the unitized hardware, software, and database. The brain. The mind? The soul? Anyway, Gimmick himself.

The robot toiled stolidly. Attachments on its four arms loosened rocks and flung them off, to bounce across the lower terrain. Often it paused while the intelligence considered, then moved to another spot. Christian knew this was to excavate efficiently and avoid causing a slide. His judgment was poor by comparison, his muscles weak. Nevertheless, if he was cautious he could help rather than hinder-help just a bit.

The body began to appear, cruelly battered and rent. The corona climbed.

Christian dug. After a while he gasped. The spacesuit’s equilibrators couldn’t quite keep up; his faceplate fogged, his air thickened and stank. Hands trembled on handles. “Conserve yourself,” advised the serene voice. “You’ll be wanted for a precision task.”

He yielded. To stop his labor was about as hard a thing as he could recall ever doing.

A sliver of sun blazed over the ridge. Suddenly shadows were long and sharp. Small craters stood out of them like atolls. Stars fled from eyesight.

Fifteen hours . . . But well before then, the solar wind would sweep across the land, bearing its radiation rain. Furnace heat would follow. Only in the rover was there refuge.

”If you are prudent, you will retreat,” said the voice.

”I know,” Christian answered. “I ain’t.”

The robot worked on.

The midsection emerged. If Christian’s faceplate had not been self-darkening, the light off it would have blinded him. But he could at last get to his real job.

Nearly level, the sunbeams were little diffused. Night still hung around whatever they did not strike directly. The tool kit secured to his suit included provisions such as flashbeams and miniradars, but often he had to go by touch, through sensory-amplifying power gloves. The objective was to open several layered shells and detach the independent unit, as delicately as a brain surgeon.

”The background count is rising fast,” said the intelligence.

”Shut up,” said Christian. “I’m busy.”

And somehow he freed Gimmick before either of them took too large a dose. He cradled the spheroid and its trailing cables in his arms, he crept down the rubble slope and leaped across the regolith. Dust puffed from his boots. The airlock opened for him. He stumbled through and up to the cabin, where he collapsed into a seat. His heart thuttered. As yet, the turmoil in him drowned any feeling of triumph. Mostly he lusted for a cold beer. Or two or three or four.

The robot spent a while examining the discarded machine and selecting rock specimens before it joined him. It had no reason to hurry.

5

Like Christian, Gimmick need not be in rapport in order to process data and execute a program-to remember, think, be aware. Unlike him, it did not need a body for this. A power supply and a few input-output connections sufficed. Upon returning, it had been linked to the central intelligence for purposes of downloading and analyzing the knowledge it brought. Those circuits were now inoperative.

The voice from the intercom should therefore have been flat, the words an unemotional report. To mimic humanness as well as the central intelligence did required capabilities beyond any called for in an explorer-especially an explorer that would often be under the guidance of a human mind. Yet tone and language this day carried more than bare information. Something else, a hint as of life, flowed along.

”You’ve found the cause of the collapse?” Christian asked eagerly.

”Uh-huh,” replied Gimmick. “The nanotech studied crystal structures atom by atom, and then the big brain set up a model and ran it. It turns out this particular mineral combination is unusually vulnerable to thermal stress. Oh, not much, or the crag wouldn’t have stood so long. But gigayears of heat and cold, heat and cold chewed on it. Solar wind and cosmic rays didn’t help. Flaws developed and grew till any substantial shock would bring everything tumbling down. Sooner or later, a good-sized meteorite would have hit nearby.”

Christian frowned. “We gave it no such push.”

”Sure, our seismic probe was gentle. But the resonant frequencies were enough. Construction or a spacecraft landing in the neighborhood would have done the same.”

”How great a problem will this be?”

”We’ll have to find out. Probably not very. The rock doesn’t appear to be a common sort. In any case, the planners will be forewarned.”

”I daresay the business was worth what it cost, then. But we’re earning our pay!”

Did the voice quiver, ever so faintly? “When can we start surveying again?”

”Don’t know. I’ve looked into the matter, and it isn’t practical to modify any robot on the planet for you. If making a new body and shipping it from Earth will take too long, I’ll negotiate early termination of our contract and let another team succeed us. I don’t want to sit idled for months, above all on Mercury.” Christian glanced at Willem Schuyten. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Nothing wrong with the company here.”

The older man smiled wryly. “Aside from a lack of live women. I don’t especially care for virtuals.”

”And the rest of the universe waiting,” Christian said, more softly still.

The cyberneticist gave him a look that went deep. For a moment the room lay silent. It was Christian’s quarters. At present, one wall screen held a view of Saturn in space, jewel-exquisite. In another, dry snow drifted across a flank of Everest, white beneath lordly blue. A third, smaller, displayed a portrait of his Ellen, which he seldom animated anymore, and a fourth had the likeness of their son, which he often did. His guitar leaned against a desk cluttered with figurines and the equipment for creating them. A bottle and two tumblers stood companionably on the table between the men.

Christian stirred. “Well,” he said toward the intercom, “I’ll let you know as soon as I do myself. Meanwhile, if you’ve nothing to keep you amused, I expect you’ll turn yourself off. Adios.”

”Until then,” responded the voice, and ceased.

”Escape from boredom,” Christian muttered. “I envy you that.”

”Do you really?” asked Willem almost as low.

Christian paused before he replied. “I suppose not. Envy wouldn’t make sense, would it?”

”Not envy of a machine. But you spoke with Gimmick the way one speaks with a friend.”

Christian shrugged. “Habit. Haven’t you ever talked or sworn at a machine?”

”I said ‘spoke with,’ not ‘spoke at.’ It never struck me before-I never was exposed to it so directly-how you two converse. How eerily lifelike Gimmick sounded. How much like you.”

”I shouldn’t think you’d be surprised. You’re the expert on AI.”

”It’s an enormous field, and enlarging exponentially. I had no experience with your sort of team until I came to Mercury. And of course my work here has been with the main system,” helping it direct the manifold activities on a world full of unknowns.

”But I mean, it’s so obvious. Gimmick’s not a thing I steer like a boat or put on and take off like a glove. He can operate by himself. He makes judgments and acts on them. He learns. Naturally he’d learn-pick up traits-from me.”

”And you from him,” Willem said slowly.

Christian’s hand, reaching for his drink, dropped to the table and doubled into a fist. “I never thought I’d hear that out of your mouth,” he snapped. “ ‘Dehumanization,’ ‘emotional deprivation,’ all the Organicist quack-quackery infesting Earth.”

Willem raised his own palm. “Peace, I pray. I certainly do know better. No offense intended. My apologies.”

Christian relaxed somewhat. “I’m sorry. Overreaction, stupid of me.” He gave the other a rueful smile. “After that go-around at the scarp, I guess my nerves haven’t yet stopped jangling.”

”Very understandable. But I do want to make a point, and then . . . lead up to something that’s been more and more on my mind.”

Christian lifted the tumbler, sipped, and leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead, do.”

”You’ve given Gimmick a name, jocular, but doesn’t that in itself show a feeling? And you persistently refer to Gimmick not as ‘it’ but ‘he.’ “

”Sure. Why not? I’ve owned a couple of boats on Earth, named them, and called them ‘she.’ “

”But you said it yourself, Gimmick is not a passive piece of machinery. Within . . . his . . . limits, to all intents and purposes, he thinks. In linkage with you, he becomes ... an aspect, a facet of a human being.”

”No,” Christian said quietly. “In linkage, together, we’re more than human.”

”In sensory range, in capabilities, yes. Which is bound to affect you. But you are the man. Yours are the instincts, drives, fears and hopes, joys and sorrows, everything that four billion years of evolution on Earth has made. Do you imagine contact with that would not affect him?”

Again Christian gathered his thoughts before he answered. “Of course it has. During the time we’ve worked as a team, and that’s been a spell now, I’ve noticed. And not been surprised.” He tossed off a dram. “That’s part of why I get so angry at those snotheads. Robotization of humans? How about humanization of robots?”

”Within their limits, as you put it,” Willem said carefully.

Christian nodded. “Agreed. I don’t pretend Gimmick is the equal of-of you. How can we compare . . . apples and bluebirds?”

”When you insisted on going out and risking your life, you claimed it was to save the data. They did prove to be important. However, what you really intended was to rescue your friend. Was it not?”

Christian sat silent.

Willem sighed. “Still, compared to the central intelligence here on Mercury, not to speak of the greater systems on Earth, Gimmick is very limited. And as I said, things are changing exponentially. Now I will soon be obsolete and retire to rusticate. Everybody like me will.

”Where will it end? Where does computational power leave off and actual consciousness begin? I don’t know, and this field has been my lifelong specialty. Nobody knows, and they’ve been wondering about it for two or three centuries.”

He leaned forward. His eyes sought Christian’s and held fast. “But I do know a few things that are not yet public. You have heard of uploading entire personalities into a computer?”

”Who hasn’t?” Christian retorted. “Isn’t that another notion they’ve kicked around ever since when? Last analysis I saw, the idea was unworkable. Entropy. . .” Confronting the sudden intensity across the table, he let his words trail off.

”That was then,” Willem said. “We’ve reached the truly steep part of the progress curve. Uploading should be possible within another ten or fifteen years. Scan the entire organism, transfer the informational matrix to a database in an advanced neural network, add sensors and effectors. Yes, a machine existence. But not like any ordinary or even extraordinary robot’s. And maybe later-Who knows what will become possible later?

”If, by then, you want it.”

Christian shivered. “Yes.” Willem nodded. “I have been watching you and your partner. You strike me as an excellent candidate for uploading.

”The first starships should be ready not long after the end of sour mortal life expectancy. The expeditions will need an element of human judgment, human will and desire. Think about it. Barring mishaps such as you have lately courted, you have time to decide. How would you like a continuation of you to go to the stars?”

IV

No living man or woman ever went. Flesh is too frail.

Consider. Light in vacuo moves at the ultimate velocity, some three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Nothing can outrace it. For matter, that would require more than infinite energy; for information it would imply systems able to reach backward through time and alter the past that brought them into being.

In the era when the pioneer voyagers left Sol, light took four and a third years to traverse the distance to the next nearest sun. The average separation of stars in their outlying part of the galaxy was about twice that.

If an interplanetary mission was urgent, a spacecraft sometimes boosted to as high as a hundred kilometers per second. Thus it got from Earth to Mars in a minimum of ten days, to far Pluto in a year and a half. Such haste was extravagant of power, seldom used, and only by flyers of small mass. Otherwise robots fared at their leisure.

Given a speed like this, one could make the least of interstellar crossings in thirteen thousand years.

The central intelligence on Earth, linked to its subordinates and to its equals elsewhere in the Solar System, designed vessels more capable. It was scarcely necessary to test them once they were built-or, we might better say, grown. So profound was the intelligence’s understanding of natural law and physical reality, so potent its logic and mathematics. The Alpha Centauri expedition was only ten years under way. In due course it would be feasible to approach the speed of light.

Now, space is in fact not a vacuum. Hydrogen and helium gas pervade it, together with dust that here and there forms great clouds. Nowhere is this medium dense, except when a part falls in on itself and makes new stars. In Sol’s region at that time it ran to approximately one atom per cubic centimeter. Yet anything moving at any substantial fraction of the ultimate velocity encounters many of them every second. Each collision releases energy. The hard radiation would kill an organic creature well-nigh instantly.

It was difficult enough to protect the electronics and photonics of the machines, or even their metal. Material shielding did not suffice. Besides producing secondary radiation, as bad as the primary or worse, it would soon be ablated away. Magnetohydrodynamic force fields were required, closely controlled, ever changeable according to need, as subtle as they were powerful. They too were incompatible with carbon-based life-which, in any case, demanded absurdly elaborate and massive apparatus for its maintenance. Consciousness went to the stars: machine consciousness. Watched from outside, that inaugural departure was a sight beautiful but hardly spectacular. An arrowlike shape, ashine in the light of the distant sun, glided from orbit and dwindled into heaven. Later an aureole surrounded it and trailed it, like an incandescent comet, though this was mainly at wavelengths beyond the visible. When it reached its goal it transmitted its discoveries and experiences back to the central intelligence and to any humans who cared.

Many did, often because the starfarer was not altogether alien. A robot aboard carried the spirit of Christian Brannock.

V

The countryside rolled in gentle hills, intensely green, starred with wildflowers. Trees stood alone or in small, widely strewn groves, oak, beech, elm. A breeze tossed light and shadow through their crowns. Looking out, Laurinda Ashcroft could almost feel warmth and wind, hear birdsong, breathe odors of growth.

But the view was electronic, for her house and its few neighbors lay underground. Nor was the nature above them ancient. A century ago this had been a plantation, broken here and there by the ruins of an ugly industrial town. Not until the useful genetically engineered monstrosities became obsolete was everything razed and a preserve created.

Yet above a ridge to the east rose a steeple, as it had for more than a thousand years.

All this beauty can die again, she thought, crushed beneath ice, sickened and seared by radiation, or-who knows? Someday, somehow, by some or other cosmic chance, it must. The knowledge saddened. Unless, before then, Terra Central decides it’s outlived its value.

She recoiled from that idea, the sense of helplessness. Never mind! Right now we only have to cope with the universe. Which means first coping with man.

Will and strength rallied. She turned back to her visitor. He stood waiting for her to find words after his cautious greeting. The trace of a smile on his lips was like a flag of truce.

Not that Omar Hamid would recognize a symbol so archaic. Laurinda drew breath, formed a full smile herself, and bowed her head briefly over bridged fingers. He responded likewise. The modern gesture calmed her. The foreboding that his entry had roused died away as quickly as it had risen. It had been unreasonable. After all, he had called ahead, days in advance, and he was here simply to talk. She was surprised that meeting him could affect her so much.

”Yes, you’re welcome, Omar,” she said. “Always.”

His shyness, if that was what it had been, hardened into a certain wariness. “In spite of my errand?” His Inglay was more accented than formerly. Perhaps he hadn’t had many occasions to use it.

Laurinda shook her head. “In spite of its having been so long,” she answered low.

”I’m sorry.” It sounded genuine. “I thought you would rather not . . . see me again.”

”True. For a while.”

”And then?” The tone was half anxious.

”It stopped hurting. I remembered what was good. Otherwise- we made a mistake, you and I. An honest mistake, and we were very young.”

The look he gave her was briefly, uncannily familiar. It was as if the wrinkles and the short white beard were a mask, gone transparent for a glimpse of the face she once knew.

”Sometimes I even wished you would call,” she added.

”I hardly dared,” he said.

”Me too. Although I think what we both feared most was pride, wounded youthful pride, each other’s and our own.”

”It would probably have been another mistake to try again.”

”The same one, with the same result. Or still more bitter. But I did begin thinking, now and then, how nice it would be to hear from you.”

”Likewise for me. Of course, I kept hearing of you, oftener and oftener. I hoped-I hope you’ve been happy.”

”Why should I not have been?”

”Your life became so different.”

Their gazes met and held steady, but somehow hers went through him, beyond this room and this moment. “ ‘A sea change,’ “ she murmured, “ ‘into something rich and strange.’ “

The living planet and the souls upon it. The knowledge, vision, wisdom, and presence of Terra Central. The minds at other stars, the stars themselves, the marvel and mystery that is the cosmos. And I amidst all these.

Omar’s question drew her back out of reverie. “What do you mean;

”Oh, that,” she said, carefully careless. “Only a quotation.”

”Your style of talking has certainly changed. Scholarly, is that the word? I suppose working with Terra Central did it.”

”Not really. I read a great deal.” Laurinda formed a new smile. “Anachronistic habit, agreed.”

But necessary, she had found-for her, at any rate, if not for everyone who served as an interface between human and machine. Those wonders were too great, those thoughts too high. She had been in danger of losing her own humanness to them. The works and songs of the past redeemed it. Sometimes that past, even its fictions-Hamlet, Anne Elliott, Wilkins Micawber, Vidal Benzaguen-felt closer to her than the world she lived in.

She broke off. “Enough,” she said. “At least, enough about me. Do sit down, please. What refreshment can I offer? You used to like coffee, black, strong, and sweet.”

”Thank you,” Omar replied. “I still do.” He paused. “Thank you for remembering.”

Chairs shaped themselves to bodies with fluid, unnoticed sensuality. Laurinda gave the house an instruction. “Tell me about yourself,” she urged her guest.

”You know.” He spoke defensively.

”Just your recent activities. What did you do, how did you do, in the years between?”

He shrugged. “On the whole, contented. I pursued my interests-mainly sports, you know.”

”I suppose you became a champion.”

”Not quite, but I didn’t do badly.”

”I’m sorry. I should have followed the athletics news.”

”No, no. I realize you’ve had too much other claim on your attention.” Ruefulness: “Besides, that also is well behind me. Treatments, therapies, regenerations, the whole kit of somatics, can only hold off aging for so long.” Again he regarded her, and she thought that what he saw pained him a little. He continued faster: “Games and contests haven’t been everything. I’ve made a fair amount of yun both as a coach and as a personal counselor.”

She raised her brows. “Yun?”

”Local slang. I’ve spent the past decade mainly on Taiwan. If you haven’t happened to encounter the word, it means credit earned,  over and above the basic issue. Do they still call it plusses in England?”

”Yes. I should have guessed. But I feel a bit overwhelmed today.” Laurinda hesitated. “I don’t want-to be impertinent-but-“

Omar chuckled, more nearly at ease than hitherto. “But you were never timid. Well, for the most part I’ve been happy. One ortho-marriage lasted more than forty years. We were allowed two children. We chose girls.” He must have seen her own quick pain; he must know she had never had any. Doubtless he assumed that was because, whatever her relationships with men, none had endured. Or did he go deeper and see that Terra Central had taken up too much of her time, of herself? He finished roughly: “And I’ve become active in public affairs.”

She nodded. “Politics.”

Scorn responded. “Not standing for election. What does any political office mean anymore? But advisory committees,”

”That is today’s main form of politics, isn’t it? That, and working to create a general consensus on major issues.”

”It’s why I’ve come here.”

”Certainly. Again, welcome, old friend.”

The house recognized a psychological moment. A servitor glided in to set down the newly synthesized coffee for him, tea for her, and small cakes. Incense wafted from a miniature brazier. As they partook they exchanged conventional remarks, empty of practical significance, full of emotional tones, two animals instinctively reassuring one another. This visit in person, from halfway around the globe, said more than any telepresence ever could.

When he ended the interlude, she sensed that he must force himself. “You know what I’ll ask of you.”

She looked away, off into one of the screens where the day outside shone. “Do you really believe I can grant it?”

”I can hope. It’s not as if we were at a final decision point. The debate may go on for years.” His voice harshened. “Unless Terra Central strikes it down and orders an action.”

Her head swung back toward him. She stiffened. “What makes you imagine that could happen?”

”I said it before. What force is left in the World Charter or the law of any state? We talk, we vote, we go solemnly through our traditional motions, but the decisions that matter come from the machine intelligences-at the summit, from Terra Central.”

”Not decisions, not commands. Advice, which we do best to follow.”

”You imply the world has become too complex, too precarious, for mere humans to understand and control.”

”It always was, wasn’t it?” she said quietly.

Taken aback, he sat mute for a while. Perhaps he reflected that her books must have given her more knowledge of the historical past, the terrible past, than most people had. At last he replied, ‘Well, facts, logic, models, calculations, yes, of course we need Terra Central, the whole cybernetic system. But what we want, what we feel, that counts for at least as much.”

”She welcomes this input too.”

He stared. “She . . . ?” he whispered.

”Just what do you wish of me?” Laurinda challenged.

”That you, today, speak for liberty. The last liberty we have. If those proposals go through, we’ll lose it.”

”I don’t agree.” Almost automatically, so often had she explained the viewpoint, she added, “True, if we take her counsel we’ll have to accept certain changes. But largely it will be less a matter of anything compulsory than of giving up some things for the sake of the future. Some parklands must be converted, some volcanoes awakened, some installations built, a number of other programs carried out. To pay for this, a slight reduction in basic credit issue; there will be things we can’t afford any longer, but, really, very minor. No worse. I honestly can’t find sense in the claims your faction has been making.”

”The changes won’t be that minor. Nor the compulsions. Only think of the Siberian forest gone back to steppe, North Africa back to desert, lava burying the Gardens of Hawai’i-all the loss of recreation, places to be alone in, to draw a free breath in. More than that, the condemning of property, the displacement of residents. When instead we can simply-“

She cut him off. “Please. We’ve both fallen into our set-piece speeches, haven’t we? Let me just point out that there’s nothing ‘simply’ about your scheme. It carries its own price. And the heaviest part of that price would fall on later generations who were never given a choice.”

”Are you sure of that? They’ll have had nine thousand years to make ready, in whatever way they themselves find best.”

”No, I am not sure. She isn’t. History is chaotic. Nobody and nothing can forecast what the situation, the possibilities and impossibilities, will be in another nine thousand years. We must secure these resources against that day, while we still definitely have them and have the means to use them.”

Starkness yielded to sadness. “But why are we repeating these worn-out arguments, Omar? Did you actually believe you could convince me in two or three hours, or that I could then convince others?”

”It seemed worth trying,” he admitted. “Your influence isn’t negligible. Oh, obviously I can’t change your basic opinion today, if ever. But I was hoping to persuade you to give ours honorable men-lion, to tell your audience they should listen to us and think seriously about what we have to say.” His voice gathered passion. “Laurinda, I know you love all the life on Earth. But doesn’t the freedom of that life-to cope for itself, to evolve-doesn’t that matter too? Do you like the prospect of life turned into nothing but a, 11 pet, controlled down to the last cell by a machine?”

Stung, she snapped, “You know that’s ridiculous.”

The thought flitted through her, not for the first time: Is it? She struck back: “Carry it just a little further, and you may as well join the Stormseekers.”

Memory rose against her will, of a rally in North America. She had seen a bit of it on the news and ordered a complete replay. The words rolled thunderous: “-I say let the Ice come. It won’t be the end of the world, it will foe a strengthening and a liberation. Life was never more rich, more vigorous, than last time, in the Pleistocene, nor man more creative, more free. When Terra Central lies dead beneath the glacier, then from the cold tundras to the rainlands around the Equator, men will again make their own destinies.-“ The gathering cheered, applauded, waved banners aloft. She took comfort from the fact that they were few, those misfits, misanthropes, technophobes, romantics, irrationalists of every kind. Yet they did warn her of an underlying rebellious lust for adventure, the hunter heritage of the entire race. And . . . young, blond, tall, broad-shouldered, totally male, how beautiful the speaker was!

Omar’s retort called her back. “That’s unfair. Once you were more open-minded.”

”Or I knew less,” she said.

”Or Terra Central hadn’t become your own center.”

His bitterness bit her. “Are you that angry, Omar?”

He was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-“ They sat silent for a number of heartbeats before he finished: “It seems, after all these years, we can still hurt one another.”

And the years will not return. “Yes, I have changed,” she said. “You too, no doubt, but I more.” Sometimes, lying awake at night, I miss the girl I was. Less her heedless health, dizzying joyfulness, even the quick sharp sorrows, than her dreams that knew no bounds.

”Well, I’ll listen to you, dear,” she went on. “Then will you listen to me? While we can . . . Though I’d rather we talked about what’s happened to us, like old friends come back together at last.”

And for the last time, she foreknew.

2

Laurinda Ashcroft did not much revise her global broadcast later that day. It was one among several by well-known interfaces, intended over a period of years to make the danger clear and explain Terra Central’s plan for coping. She had prepared most of it beforehand, the usual visuals plus occasional virtuals to invoke every sense.

Watching, you saw Earth revolve around the sun. You saw her orbit drawn in three dimensions, a golden track against blackness and the stars. You saw how she, her moon, and her sister globes interplayed, a dance through billions of years wherein gravitation called the measures, subtly but inexorably. You saw the slow cycle of changeable eccentricity and obliquity, how it set the patterns of lightfall across the planet and how she responded with her air, seas, clouds, rains, snow, and ice.

Since the Arctic Ocean became landlocked, the glaciers had some and gone and come again. In the great winters, northern Europe, half of North America, and huge tracts elsewhere lay under ice whose cliffs reared as high as two kilometers; drowned lands rose anew as sea level dropped a hundred meters; forests withered and died while south of them marshlands came into being and new forests overran the savannahs. Yes, life adapted. If some species suffered, others flourished. But this was on a millennial timescale, scant help to humans and their works.

The next glaciation was overdue. They had unwittingly delayed its beginnings with their emission of greenhouse gases. Now that was past, together with the overpopulation that brought it about, and in any event would not have sufficed. Now more snow fell in winter than melted in summer. Meter by meter, faster each year, the glaciers crept down from the Pole and the mountains.

”You have surely heard what we must do, and soon, before it is too late. Thicken the greenhouse. Thin the clouds. Darken the snows. Make Earth keep more of the sun’s warmth than she can unaided. But perhaps you don’t yet know the magnitude of this, the number of the centuries, or the delicacy and exactness underneath the enormous forces we will call on. Let me show you a little.”

Again, visuals and virtuals. Carbon black strewn over the Arctic, tonne after colloidal tonne, repeated year after year as the layer washes away or sinks from sight. Immense electric discharges high aloft, to force rainfalls so that less light is cast back into space. Mats of brown algal weed carpeting the seas by millions of square kilometers; the care and feeding of these living artifacts. Underwater detonations to break up beds of methane hydrate and release the gas into the atmosphere. Forests set afire and afterward only grasses allowed, for they store less carbon than trees do. Holes drilled down into the very mantle of the planet; nuclear explosions to goad volcanoes into spewing forth carbon dioxide and water vapor more copiously than fossil fuels ever did. The new industries required, their claim on resources, their constructs and monitors everywhere.

”Yes, this will be an Earth very different from the Earth we thought we had restored for ourselves.” Laurinda leaned forward, as if each person watching sat before her in the flesh. “But it will be far less changed than the Ice Age would change it. Our world will still be green, rich, kindly, from rim to rim of the Polar oceans. We will keep many of our woodlands, open waters, pure snowpeaks. And on the new prairies, what wildflowers will bloom, what herds will graze!”

She gave them the images, the sounds, the sense of wind and fragrances, simulated but as vivid as reality. Idealized, yes. But not dishonest. We can have such places.

”Please bear in mind, this will not happen at once. The work must go slowly, piecemeal, in pace with the astronomical cycle, constantly observed and measured, constantly adjusted to hold the giants of climate and weather under control. It will take thousands of years. Then finally, as Earth tilts back sunward, it will be undone, just as gradually and carefully. Most of us will notice little of it in our lifetimes. To our children and children’s children, hundreds of generations, it will be natural, a part of their universe like the moon and stars.”

”That’s the worst,” Omar said. “To them Terra Central will foe what God was to their ancestors. Oh, I don’t suppose they’ll worship it. But they’ll know how utterly dependent on it they are. And meanwhile it will he doing what God never did, evolve itself till it’s beyond all human comprehension. What then, Laurinda?”

Earlier, she had not meant to give his viewpoint as much voice as she now did. However, this might actually be the wisest course. He and his fellows were making their protests widely known. By taking them seriously, she, a designated speaker for the artificial intelligence, could perhaps better show why they were wrong.

”Doubtless most of you have heard that certain people think this whole concept is mistaken.” She left out Omar’s Disastrously mistaken. The more so because it’s millennially slow and all pervading. She smiled. “They are not fools. They have studied the situation and done scientific analyses. Let me discuss their position as I see it. They are right when they say there is an easier, cheaper, and far less disruptive way to stop the Ice.”

Robots in space. Asteroids mined, the stuff of them refined, nanotechnic assemblers forming titanic mirrors to precisions of micrometers, the judicious orbiting of these-no simple task, but well within present-day capabilities. Governed by mathematics and monitors less complex than in the rival scheme, the mirrors’ shine added sunlight onto Earth at the times, places, and intensities needed. The glaciers retreat, climates stabilize, the system stands guard through the necessary era and stands in reserve forever after.

”It would take away the night skies we’ve regained. We would not see many stars, for there would be no full darkness. But simulacra are plentiful; or you can enjoy a holiday in space; and otherwise our world remains much the same.

”Why, then, does Terra Central warn against this?” Again the bright, cold animated diagrams, but expanded first to a galactic scale, then contracted to Sol’s near neighborhood, then down to molecules and force fields.

Space is not empty. Look at the Milky Way on a clear night and you will see bays in its river that are clouds of dust. The dust in such nebulas as Orion’s is luminous from the light of new-born stars, and more are condensing out of it. Hydrogen and helium, the primordial elements, far outmass these quantities of solid material, which are nevertheless colossal. Nowhere do the gas and motes of the interstellar medium reach a density equal to what would count as a hard vacuum on Earth; but taken together, through sevenfold billion cubic light-years, they dominate the visible universe.

Nor are they spread evenly. In some regions they occur more thinly or thickly than elsewhere. Sometimes a knot in the medium grows tight enough to collapse in on itself, and stars and planets form.

Sometimes, swinging around the galactic core on its two hundred million-year path, Sol encounters a dense cloud.

The one immediately ahead was nothing extraordinary. It would never engender worlds. It was merely a few times more compact than the local average and merely a few light-years in extent. Early astronomers had caught no definite sight of it. Even after they were using spaceborne instruments, they were not sure.

”Our interstellar outposts have the baselines to map this shoal with certainty. They have sent us their findings. In about nine thousand years, Sol will enter the region. Yes, it will only transect. A hundred thousand years later, it will be back in clear space. But a hundred thousand years is a long time for living creatures.”

The contact presses on Sol’s wind and magnetic field until the heliosphere and its bow wave, the hydrogen wall, are inside the orbit of Saturn. With the protection they give thus lessened, Earth takes a sleet of cosmic rays, background count tripled or quadrupled. Oh, life has survived comparable events in the past, but species, genera, whole orders died, ecologies to which they had been vital avalanche into ruin, mass extinctions followed. And, in the depths of this encounter, enough hydrogen atoms could reach Earth to deplete her oxygen, enough dust to fill her stratosphere with ice particles and bring on a world of winter like none before.

”Nine thousand years, our well-wishing opponents say. Ample time to make ready. Meanwhile, why should we lock ourselves into a program that will transform our civilization?

”People of Earth, through me and my colleagues Terra Central tells you that defense against the nebula calls for resources we dare not spend on anything less.”

Monstrous constructions, thousands of them, in orbits that only machine intelligence can maintain-powered by thermonuclear reactions or often by the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter-and first the antimatter must be manufactured by megatonnes-generating forces to ionize alien atoms and whirl the plasmas away-a citadel around the entire globe, waging a war that lasts a tenth of a million years.

”Sun-mirrors to hold back the glaciers in the near future won’t be compatible with this. Their advocates admit it, but say that come the time, we can make adjustments. Perhaps they are right. What they do not say is whether or not the mirrors will tie up too much material and effort. We’ll have to conduct a very thorough survey of the Solar System before we know. Meanwhile, every year we delay starting to take action, the Ice advances farther and becomes harder to fight.

”But we, people of Earth, we now alive, who must make the decision that all our descendants must live with or die by-we should think beyond the engineering requirements. Let’s ask ourselves a simple and terrible question. In the course of nine thousand years, what can happen?”

And she gave them history to show it was unforeseeable.

The Neolithic Revolution tamed wildernesses, fed suddenly large populations, founded the earliest towns, built the earliest smithies- and turned free hunters into peasant masses with god-kings above them.

Scarcely were the Pharaohs of Egypt laid to their eternal rest than thieves plundered the tombs. When railroads later ran through what had been their domains, for a while the steam engines were stoked with mummies.

The Persian Empire fell into internecine war, then fell to Alexander, whose own empire did not outlast his untimely death. What followed was a prolonged bloodbath.

Within four centuries of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, Christians were killing heretic Christians.

The peace and refinement of Heian Japan gave way to incessant struggle between clans and war lords. In China, dynasty after dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven and eventually, bloodily, lost it.

The Mongols galloped from end to end of Asia, deep into Europe, until their Khan reigned over half a continent. In a few generations that sovereignty crumbled. Nonetheless a remnant of it turned the nascent democracy of Russia into the Tsardom, and another remnant bore Islam to India.

The mighty Aztec and Inca realms broke before a handful of Spanish invaders. The wealth that flowed thence into Europe energized the trading nations of the North but rotted Spain itself, whose long-term legacy became one of tyranny and corruption.

From the “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of the French Revolution sprang Napoleon. From the idealism of Sun Yat-sen sprang Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.

No one in power understood what such modern weapons as the machine gun portended, nor was able to end the stalemate they brought before it had destroyed four empires, lives in the tens of millions, and the spiritual foundations of Western civilization. A greater war ensued, and then a twilight struggle for half a century more, while on its fringes countries newly established went at each other’s throats.

In an age when science was reaching from the innermost atom to the outermost cosmos and scientific technology was transfiguring I he human condition, ancient superstitions ran rampant, everything from astrology to witchcraft. What slowly overcame them was neither reason nor the major faiths but those lesser, often despised sects that had never compromised their creeds. Then slowly their own dominance eroded.

Instead of making governments almighty, global communications speeded the effective breakup of societies into self-determining coalitions of all kinds, ethnic, economic, religious, professional, cultural, even sexual.

Environmentalist crusaders preached, official agencies strove, but what rehabilitated an Earth devastated by overpopulation and overexploitation was a new set of technologies and the economic incentives and disincentives they brought about.

”There are no final answers, not while humans remain human. Nine thousand years is further ahead than our most ancient written records go back. What changes, what violences, what revolutions will they see? Above all, what revolutions of the spirit? We do not know.

”For the sake of our unborn and the sake of life itself on Earth, let us accept a few small sacrifices and make an irrevocable commitment now to the security of our planet-while we can do it, while we can choose to do it. Our descendants will bless us. Whatever they do, whatever they become, surely they will bless us. But already we, in this our mortal day, will have blessed ourselves.”

3

Afterward Laurinda went topside for a walk. She needed motion and aloneness. In the house she felt too connected.

Evening light streamed low, nearly level. It seemed to fill grass and leaves with gold. A flight of nestbound rooks passed across the sky. Their calls drifted faintly down to her. A breeze cooled the air like a whisper from oncoming night.

Striding, she felt tension and anxiety drain away and peace flow out of the ground. It was as if her England thanked her.

The old church rose ahead. The machines that removed the deserted city had kept this relic, restored it, and maintained it. She spied an unobtrusive guardian robot-scarcely needed, as rare as visitors were. Another tended the graveyard. The names on the headstones were weathered into oblivion, yet somehow the headstones remembered.

So did the church. She entered. A window above the doors made its own sunset. Elsewhere the stained glass glowed more softly, angels and saints under a ceiling that arched toward heaven. She could just make out Christ crucified above the altar. Not for the first time, she wondered how the archeologists and the machines-ultimately, Terra Central, in whose database lay all surviving records-decided what to model the emblem on; for the Protestants must have destroyed the original. Or had they? Sometime she should ask. The thought dropped from her. She sat down in a pew and listened to silence. She imagined ghosts gathered around, worshipful and humble, in the deepening dusk.

When she left, only a westward purple remained of the daylight. Soon that too was gone. Now and then she had to glance at the attendant on her wrist, which she had ordered to point the way back. Stars twinkled forth, one by one, more and more. Seen through this slightly misty air they were not as bright or as many as they might have been. Just the same, after a while their multitude and the sense of their remoteness came upon her. Which of those that she could see had intelligences reached by now? She wasn’t sure. News from the explorers came in so slowly. Nor did she follow it very closely, being more concerned with Earth. Probably the explorers were still in Sol’s purlieus. Nevertheless, those machines, i raveling close to the speed of light, multiplying themselves wherever they found raw material and sending their offspring onward-in one or two million years the machines would have ranged over the whole galaxy.

Laurinda shivered. Once the vision had been glamorous and glorious. Tonight she began to ache, and recalled that she had eaten hardly anything all day. Yes, she was growing old.

Having descended to her house, she sought the part that was her own, not a workspace or entertainment and communication center or personal clinic but a small refuge for dreams. Virtuals weren’t enough; she wanted reality, which whim could not alter. Wainscot made a background for framed pictures of ancient scenes and shelves of ancient books; the music she played was Baroque; a copper kettle gave off steam, and soon her tea was ready and soon thereafter her supper, indistinguishable from one that might have been set forth for Jane Austen.

She didn’t command the servitor to simulate a human retainer, nor instigate a search for a friend somewhere on the planet who would feel like conversing with her. She thought she wished only for quiet, a bit of reading, and then bed.

When a voice like her mother’s contralto spoke to her, she realized that Terra Central had detected otherwise.

”May I interrupt? I would like to say you did wonderfully well. Public reaction has on the whole been positive and enthusiastic.”

”Good,” Laurinda said. “But I was just a single speaker. We need more.

Her mind went on: The effort you are mobilizing moves softly but is huge. And what if it fails, if the vote does go against your urging? What might you then call upon?

And why do I think of you as a -person?

Because you are. Not human; however, an awareness . . . a soul?

”You were eloquent,” said Terra Central, “and with an insight beyond mine.”

Startlement answered, “How?” What am I, that you are mindful of me?

”Shall I explain tonight, or would you rather wait till you have rested?”

Always Terra Central was considerate of her interfaces. Almost always, she guessed rightly. Laurinda’s heart leaped. “Please, now.”

The voice paused before continuing-to calm her a little? “I am dedicated to the well-being of life on Earth. No change I make in myself will change that. Your race is the sentient part of life. But I as I am cannot fully understand it.

”Texts, relics, perceptions, talk, are not the same as direct experience. I can follow the thoughts-even a shadow of the emotions-of gentle, rational humans such as you. But I have not the capability, the empathy if you will, to interpret why others do what they do or why your history as a whole has followed the courses it did.”

”Who, who does?” Laurinda stammered.

”It appears to me that your race is mad-not you, dear, nor most people by themselves, but your race-torn between instinct and intellect, the animal and something beyond the animal. Is this a misinterpretation? If not, then most likely, without guidance, humankind will put an end to itself long before the cosmos would. I cannot as I am understand it well enough to know, or to provide that guidance.

”Help me, Laurinda.”

”How?” she asked, atremble, wondering what further she could do in what years were left to her.

”Do not die. When your body is worn out, let me upload your mind and memories.”

Cold struck through. “No! No. I’ve . . . thought about it, of course, but everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve heard-I don’t want to be a robot.”

”I know. But would you become one with me?

”A kind of Nirvana, yes, you no longer a uniqueness but an enrichment of the whole. Yet you’ll be there for millions of years or more, and, as need may be, I can resurrect you in emulation as you were.

”It’s an offer I can only make to a few. This is a newly created capability, and my capacity for it is limited thus far. Later—But I would like to take you, Laurinda, before you are gone forever,

”Think about it. Remember, though, your last hour for choosing is not so very far away.”

VI

Seventeen hundred years later, a thing occurred that lived in people’s memories for generations, until lifeways changed too much for them to make sense of it.

In those days communities, fellowships, nations, and ethnoi all had their own ways of observing New Century’s Eve. In Tahalla it climaxed a month of ceremonies and celebrations. Some of these equalled Creation Day or Remembrance in solemnity, others rivaled Fire Night or the Festival for Children in joyousness. The quinquennial Darvic Games now took on an even greater importance; the glory that winning players brought to their clans would heighten the standing of every member and the influence of every captain for the next decade or more.

The opening procession moved grandiose down Covenant Boulevard. Sunlight out of a hard blue sky flared off metal and seemed to set banners afire. Folk stood ten deep on either side. One did not sit at home and merely watch an occasion like this. One came, partook, joined in the hymns and the cheers, saw high-born and heroes pass by in the living flesh, felt the surge and throb of exultation, and needed no psychotrope for the spirit to soar. Most had arrived in groups, wearing the special garb of guild or society, but the groups had mingled randomly. The white gowns and red sashes of educators might be wedged between the purple-and-gold tunics of Magnificos and the scarlet cloaks and plumed headdresses of Torchmen, or some Falcons in close-fitting blue and gray cluster by some green-clad physicians. Only the philosophers kept individually apart, a scattering of hooded gray robes trimmed with iridescent flickercloth. As was their traditional right, the Terpsichoreans cavorted in front of everybody, on the street itself, limbs, long hair, and filmy garments flying. The morning was already hot, but nobody heeded. It baked fragrances from the pavement.

Behind reared the many-hued walls, shimmering colonnades, and jewel-faceted cupolas of central Roumek. Everything was cleaned and polished; often intricate patterns of mosaic or sculpture had been added; but no facade changed appearance except as shadows shifted with the sun. Owners vied to produce astonishing effects only at the Festival of Illusions. The Games were different, an occasion religious as well as secular.

Trumpets rang, sonors pealed and thundered, tuned fountains and the Singing Tower blent their own music in. Helmets and cuirasses agleam, lances and lasers held high, a squad of Honorables went in advance, riding white elks whose antlers had been gilded. Hierophants, one from every hinterland in Tahalla, followed on foot, wearing their canonicals and bearing their symbols according to their orders: of God the Dreamer of the Universe, God the Mother, God the Summoner (black cassock, impaled skull), God the Lover (rainbow hues and wreathed staff). After them glided the car of the Holy Interpreter. Robotic agents attended his sumptuously canopied throne and comforted him in his opalescent vestments with fans from which streamed cool breezes. Another detachment of Honorables rode behind.

Then came the Regnant and First Consort. Their thrones were on a dais at the center of a great moving stage, from whose corners undulated the shapes of a golden dragon, a scarlet flame, a blue whirlwind, and a flowering vine. On the Regnant’s left sat the heir apparent, on the Consort’s right the Chief Enactor. Benched below were the Council. Senior guardsmen stood along the sides, tossing tokens of diamond and ruby into the crowd. The garb and accouterments of all these dazzled every beholder.

A dozen men who stood at the front wore simply the insignia of the clans of which they were captains, together with emblems of whatever societies they might belong to-except for the one at the center, from whose shoulders hung the Cloak of Darva and in whose hand rested the Staff of Supremacy. Yet gazes followed them more than any others: for these were the appointed stewards of the Games.

Magnates of the city, commanders of lesser communities, and rural landkeepers rode after, most in open cars, some on horses of fanciful genetics, each attired in his or her finest. Behind them marched the players, in bands under the standards of whatever contests they were to enter but every individual proudly dressed in a tunic of the color pattern marking his or her clan. And the shouts burst over them like surf.

Mikel headed the auvade contingent, for his father Wei, captain of Clan Belov, was among the stewards. Of course, kinship disqualified Wei from judging that competition. However, Mikel would have scorned nepotism and needed none; already he had won Second Master status. He should have gone toward the sacred grounds afloat on happiness, awaiting fresh renown at the very least, hoping for triumph.

Rancor filled his mouth. He felt as if the hurrahs around him and the blossoms thrown at his feet were mockery. His overriding thought was of how he might turn victory into revenge.

2

Almost seven decades older than his son-otherwise he and his lady had set a good example and contented themselves with virtual children-Wei Belov took the matter stonily. “It is a disappointment, yes,” he said. “It is not a humiliation unless we let it be.”

Nevertheless Mikel raged. So did a number of young clansmen. They roiled about the manor, crying denunciations of Arkezhan Socorro and the Chief Enactor, then whistling in unison the sinister ancient Gun Song. They galloped or careened over the countryside, to the terror of innocent grazers. They flitted to Roumek and got into drunken brawls with any Socorros they happened upon. Finally Wei broadcast an injunction. “This behavior disgraces us,” he declared. “It shall cease at once. Whoever continues it will be publicly censured and barred from next year’s Affirmation Day rites.” The furore died down.

None but his lady knew how he himself felt, and perhaps not even she. A captain of Clan Belov bore his own troubles uncomplainingly, as befitted his dignity. Still, she and Mikel could guess. His silences at home, his solitary walks, and his withdrawal from most global intercommunication told them much.

The Regnant should have made him not simply a steward but Supreme Steward of these Games. While the five-year cycle of succession was not immutable, it was customary, and this time Belov’s turn fell on New Century’s Eve. Wei had served well at earlier Darvics. Moreover, in his youth he had won trophies for mountaineering on the moon and dune skiing on Mars. He was president of the national wildlife commission, which often involved him in interethnic negotiations under the auspices of the Worldguide. Surely he deserved to bring this additional honor to his clan.

Now, for many years Arkezhan, Captain Socorro, had been his enemy. Wei never found out quite why. He knew of no harm he had ever done to the man or the clan, nor could he discover any that might have happened unwittingly. But Arkezhan was forever backbiting him, insulting him to the very limits of propriety, and playing nasty little tricks on him. At last Wei shrugged it off as due to jealousy. Arkezhan’s career had been less than brilliant.

Yet he made himself a favorite of Mahu, Captain Rahman, who became Chief Enactor of the realm. And Mahu prevailed upon the Regnant to appoint Arkezhan Supreme Steward of the Games.

The unspoken rejection fell like a soot cloud over all Clan Belov, deepest upon the captain and his immediate kin. Arkezhan crowed. His sycophants spread rumors.

Thus matters stood on the day of the auvade.

3

Although a sunshade had deployed its film above the stadium, the tiers were brilliant with the clothes and jewels of spectators. From the judgment booth high up, they resembled terraced flowerbeds. Talk made a ceaseless murmur and rustle, as if one somehow heard the faraway sea. Down on the great hexagon, the teams stood alert, each man a spot of color on a tile along a given side, facing their mates on the opposite side, blue for Sirius, gold for Altair, red for Betelgeuse.

Wei leaned close to the viewer before which he sat and whispered an order, for he did not wish to draw attention to himself. The instrument scanned, identified its target, and lighted with the image of his son. He commanded an enlargement to one square meter. There was Mikel, panther-poised, every muscle clear to see beneath the form-fitting azure, bone strong in the amber face, a defiant cockade in the headband confining the raven’s-wing hair- a Belov to the last chromosome. His role was Comet; the insigne shone argent across his breast. If only the boy were less tense, his look less grim. Even more than strength and agility, a player needed wits.

A voice brought Wei’s glance around. Arkezhan Socorro had strolled over to his chair. “Ah,” said the Supreme Steward, “you arc anxious about your offspring, I see.”

With an effort, Wei remained seated. To be looked down at like this was detestable, but to rise would show irritation. And that would mean loss of dignity, especially here in the Presence. “I am interested, naturally,” he answered as softly as he could. “Not anxious. He is a capable athlete.”

He slightly emphasized the pronoun. Arkezhan’s son took no part in sports and was rather notoriously ungraceful in both social and ceremonial dancing.

Arkezhan concealed whatever he felt. “That will be for impartial stewards to determine.” He nodded at the three of them, Ibram Ahmad, Jon Mitsui, and Malena Mogale, where they sat ready at their own viewers. They sensed hostility in the air and looked uncomfortable.

”The fair-mindedness of my lords and my lady is beyond question,” Wei said, “unlike some.”

It was an awkward rejoinder. He had never been good at such exchanges. Arkezhan smirked. He shook his jowly head and wagged a finger the barest bit. “Yes, I have to accept their assurance that you will not abuse your privilege today.”

The three had in fact been very kind when they invited Wei, an old friend, to share the booth and its superb observation facilities. Maybe now, too late, they realized that Arkezhan was making it a mistake. Wei bit the inside of his lip. He would not embarrass them.

”You have my thanks for agreeing, sir,” he said more loudly. Swinging his chair around, he saluted the Regnant. “And all gratitude always to his gracious Radiance.” The formula tasted foul in his mouth.

Had he known beforehand that the Regnant would attend, he would probably have declined the invitation. Some heads of state in the past had observed a few contests, but usually this one appeared just at the opening of the Games. For that matter, the Supreme Steward did not necessarily oversee any particular event in person, though every judgment booth kept a seat and viewer for him. Who had persuaded these two to be here, and how and why?

Maybe they were honestly interested. Auvade had a great many devotees, not only throughout Tahalla but around all Earth and among what humans still lived elsewhere in the Solar System; probably millions were watching today.

Wei couldn’t tell. The Regnant sat impassive on the throne extruded for him, above and behind the Supreme Steward’s chair. Scarcely a fold of his robe and chasuble or plume of his headdress stirred.

Jon broke a lengthening silence. “With reverence, your Radiance, with respect, my lord, the time draws nigh.”

”Indeed,” Arkezhan said. “I regret, my lord Wei, we cannot hear your doubtless fascinating conversation. I am sure you would have told us much about the wonders of young-Niho? No, I beg your pardon, the name is Mikel, am I correct? Instead, we must witness them ourselves.” He bowed to the Regnant. “Have I the permission of the Presence to take my place?”

A hand lifted and fell again. Arkezhan sat down. “Let the honors begin,” he said. Amplified, the words boomed forth.

Trumpets resounded. Spectators roared. The diffused blue in the sunshade became a gigantic view of the board.

For a moment there was motionlessness. Each team had had its conferences, planning strategy and tactics to minimize its losses and maximize those of the others, until the last survivors belonged only to it; but now the reality was upon them.

Then a Sirian Star ran one tile forward along the straight line permitted him and stopped. A Planet came diagonally from either side to stand in front; two Moons made their three zigzags to take flanking positions, and two Meteors overleaped-passed across tiles occupied by a friendly player-to threaten Altair on the right and Betelgeuse on the left. The Comets stayed in reserve. This maneuver was classic, creating a strong defensive formation. The Sirians across from them advanced aggressively, though not far since they did not know who their opponents would be.

Those had begun somewhat similarly. An Altairian Star dashed ahead to the middle of the board and halted. A Betelgeusean Planet took the bait and slanted onto the same tile. They saluted one another. The Star advanced. The Planet sought to take the attack on his hip and throw his opponent, who would automatically lose if he crossed an edge of this tile. But the latter shifted direction, turned on one heel, got his other ankle behind the former’s, and pushed. The Planet caught the Star’s arm. Both lurched, neither went down. They broke apart, considered the situation, and sidled back in again. Abruptly the Planet went down onto the resilient surface, the Star on top, pinning him. They separated, rose, and bowed. The Planet retired from the game. Immediately, a Sirian Moon arrived. Given the advantage of freshness, he took the position.

Bouts had been erupting elsewhere. It was no melee. A player looked at the overall scene displayed overhead, decided as best he could what move might best help his team, and tried to make it and win it.

”What, does Comet Mikel still dawdle?” said Arkezhan. “Does he wait for rivals to exhaust each other?” He clicked his tongue. “It is no real service, it certainly gives no glory, although it may make his individual performance seem better than otherwise.”

”He plans-“ Wei Belov broke off. He should no longer speak in this place.

After a few more minutes Mikel did advance, choosing two tiles sideways and one forward, then one oppositely sideways and two Forward, out of the moves allowed him. It brought him to an Altairian Moon. They engaged. He prevailed. The Moon withdrew.

Mikel paused, peering upward. He was about to advance on a Betelgeusean Comet-at least, that seemed to be his optimum tactic-when a Betelgeusean Meteor took him by surprise. If they reached an edge of the board, Meteors could cross back to the opposite edge and proceed from there, as if the two sides were contiguous. However, they must move in straight lines and, unlike Stars, cross no more than six tiles before stopping, unless and until I hey were victorious at their end point.

Mikel barely gave him courtesy. They grappled ungracefully. The Meteor fell, though merely onto his rear. Mikel leaped and forced his shoulders to the ground. He conceded and left. By then, of course, the situation elsewhere had changed and Mikel’s earlier idea was of no use.

”Poor, poor form,” said Arkezhan. “Score his team down.”

”My lord,” protested Ibram, “the action was not very esthetic, lint I found no real fault.”

”Nor I,” added Malena. Jon could say nothing, his attention having been on others.

”Did you not observe how he butted with his arms and fumbled with his hands?” Arkezhan replied. “Score his team down, I say. Three points.” Each counted as a man lost, which might force the Sirians out of the game early, and the record would show this was due to Mikel Belov.

”One at most, my lord,” Malena argued. “Few actions are ever perfectly executed.”

”Three.”

Nobody refused. Arkezhan was Supreme Steward, after all; and the designated stewards had plenty else to grip their attention; and markdowns, frequent enough in any closely refereed contest, canceled each other by apportionment among the two rival groups.

Wei’s mouth drew tight.

The auvade went on. The spectators yelled, waved kerchiefs and flags, pranced on their benches when someone’s idol was victorious.

”Behold what an opportunity our Mikel Belov missed,” said Arkezhan after some minutes. “If he had taken that Altairian Planet, a Betelgeusean Comet would have been open to attack by an Altairian Star. However that encounter came out, there would have been one less survivor for the Sirians to meet.”

”Yes,” admitted Ibram. He studied the skyscene. “Easy for us to see. But who in the midst of an engagement can survey it all?”

”Competent players can, to a considerable extent. Of course, possibly our brave little Comet did not choose to meet the Planet, who does appear quite formidable.”

Malena scowled into her viewer. “My lord, you seem determined to pursue this man,” she said. “We have others to watch as well.”

”Of course. I would not criticize your decisions, my lady and my lords. But you must agree that certain players require more zealous monitoring than most. For the good of the game.”

”My lord, I do not feel that Mikel Belov is among them.”

Arkezhan shrugged. “Well, you may be right, my lady. You are old acquaintance with his family, are you not? Very close old acquaintance.”

Malena stiffened.

”If you please, my lord,” said Jon, ice in his voice.

Arkezhan raised his palms. “Oh, no, no! I would never imply, nor imagine for an instant, that my lady or either of my lords would heed any offer that any player’s father may have made.”

Wei snapped after air. The Regnant sat expressionless. The stewards could not respond, for the game was becoming ever more rapid and complex.

Suddenly Arkezhan raised his eyes from his own viewer and cried, “A foul, a foul!”

”What?” The stewards’ heads jerked about toward him.

”Did you miss it? When Mikel Belov met that Altairian Moon just now, he grabbed after the man’s groin.”

Wei’s knuckles whitened on the arms of his chair.

Malena forgot civility. “He did not.”

”Were you watching him, my lady?” Arkezhan replied. “You have the entire board to follow. I choose to focus on where my suspicions lie.”

Wei half rose. Ibram said hastily, “My lord the Supreme Steward probably missaw, as can happen to anyone. We will replay the encounter in slow motion if he insists.”

Arkezhan smiled. “No need, my lord. I will accept your judgment.

Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps in the excitement I confused a tendency with an intent.”

Wei got to his feet. His face was blanched. “Sir,” he said word by word, “I trust that that remark was inadvertent and you will retract it and apologize.”

The stewards kept their gazes on the viewers, scanning to and fro, as duty required; but Malena blurted, “Your Radiance has heard-“ She broke off, appalled at herself.

The Regnant sat unstirring.

Arkezhan smiled. “Why, I meant no harm, my lord, no basic fault to find. We are what we are. That boy has evidently chosen to do little or nothing about the characteristics he has inherited from, say, his mother.”

Wei stepped forward. He doubled his fist and struck. Arkezhan staggered back. The stewards gasped. As if it too had seen, the crowd howled.

Arkezhan recovered his stance. Blood trickled from his nose. He grinned.

4

The lands for which Clan Belov was responsible lay near the northern border of Tahalla. Beyond it continued the same Arabiyah, hills and valleys where the wind sent waves across tall grass, tossed fronds and soughed through leaves, where streams flowed into shining lakes, where great herds and their predators bounded and a flying flock often cast a shadow like a cloud’s-but the folk of Zayan had ways very different from the ways of Tahalla. So did all folk everywhere on Earth, and from each other.

Wei set his car down at the foot of a hill and climbed to the top.

As he mounted he saw more and more widely. In the distance giraffes mingled with lyrehorns and a few cheirosaurs, ignoring a pride of lions stretched sleepy on a ridge. Impulsively, meaninglessly, he waved at them. Though the reintroduction of rare species, the rebirthing of many that had gone extinct, and creation of others that never evolved happened before his lifetime, he had experienced it so often in virtuality that he felt as if he had been there, helping- as if he had even played some part, however humanly insignificant, in staving off the Ice. It gave depth and passion to the day-by-day ecological management that was his main reality occupation.

He had found a lonely place. An unobtrusive upthrust on the western horizon was the dome of a food production center, purely robotic. Smoke rose, thin and quickly scattered, from a swale kilometers off, an excursionist campfire, but that belonged, recalling a Stone Age his race had forgotten but his genes had not.

His muscles tautened, flexed, and tautened again, bearing him upward against gravity. Sunlight fell warm on his face, air passed warm through his nostrils. Earth bore no medicine for shame and grief, and he would not smother them together with his honor in drugs, but Earth itself was a balm.

He had chosen this hill because a eucalyptus grove stood on the crest, a screen across heaven. Should a survey satellite chance to pass overhead, he didn’t want it making any record of these next moments. The shade fell cool and dappled, pungencies swirled, leaves seemed to whisper his farewells for him.

He had said none when he left home today, only that he wanted to get away for a while. “I understand,” his lady answered. He suspected that she understood all too well, and her calm was her last gift.

I’m sorry, Lissa, Mikel, he thought. There is no better way to regain our pride. Is there? May you live gladly.

He drew his pistol. The single round in it was not a stun cartridge. Revival would be out of the question.

Carefully, he brought the muzzle to his temple. A cold kiss, he thought. Then: Don’t linger.

The shot crashed. A vulture high overhead started down in long, slow spirals.

5

Sesil Hance occupied a house on the outskirts of Roumek, an ornate thing of columned pillars and slender turrets, intended for a family larger than any nowadays but easily and variably adaptable for entertaining. Windows threw a soft glow into the night. Music played low, a piece the house had lately composed. From thirty meters away, its nearest neighbor joined in. Otherwise the street lay quiet, empty except for a gardener robot at work in the flower strips.

The main door knew Mikel Belov and retracted for him. He stepped into an anteroom of mahogany panels, nacre ceiling, and live carpet. Two figures appeared in full-size holography, an older man and woman. Propriety forbade a clan maiden to receive male visitors alone. Sesil’s parents preferred their rural estate. They had had these virtuals of themselves prepared for her, to speak and act as they would and record whatever the sensors observed. She had told him they trusted her and never retrieved the data. It was simply a matter of maintaining repute.

He saluted. “Greeting, Mikel Belov,” said the likeness of Yusuf Hance formally, and, equally formally, “Be welcome” the likeness of Fiora Hance.

”I thank you, my lord and lady,” he replied. Sesil came through an inner archway. A black gown over which star-points twinkled clung to her. She stopped. A hand went to her mouth. “Oh,” she breathed. Her eyes widened, as luminously dark as the fabric. “You. I hoped so much-Come, please come.” To the images: “By your leave.” She turned and led her visitor out, down a hall to a room where odors of jasmine drifted and colors played subtly through the walls. Though she turned back toward him, she made no move to join hands or to touch at all. “Please rest, my lord.” She made a ragged gesture at a lounger. “May I summon refreshment?”

He kept his feet. “You have not called me lord for more than a year,” he said. They had been close to betrothal. He stopped himself from adding “my lady.”

Her glance dropped. How long the lashes were on that delicate countenance. “No. It’s only-now-the tragedy befallen you-and now you will be Captain Belov.”

”If they elect me. That must wait a while.” Pain broke through. “Sesil, why haven’t I heard from you?”

She gestured at the holo cabinet. It came alight with the simulacra of her parents. She had seldom done that before-no impoliteness, for the realities would have left the young couple to themselves. Did she want help? Mikel repeated his question. “You know why, my lord,” pseudo-Yusuf told him. Sesil’s fingers twisted together. “I, I would have,” she stammered, “I wanted to, I wanted to, but-“ She could not go on.

He finished for her. “But my father had done a deed of violence upon a fellow officer, and in the very Presence. His whole clan was in dishonor.”

”That was so unjust!” she cried.

Mikel addressed the images. “You”-he meant the realities- “would not thereafter deal with a Belov.”

Yusuf’s voice answered slowly: “We could not very well, could we?”

”Be honest, dear,” said Flora’s. Analogue tears glimmered. “We dared not.”

Yes, Mikel thought, too many other Hances would feel you had tainted them also. “I quite understand, my lord and lady,” he said. “For my part, I had no wish to put you in a difficult position.”

Sesil raised her head and squared her frail shoulders. “But your honor is made clean again,” she said. The steadiness failed. “I hoped-I hoped-“ She swallowed. “Yes, I wept for you, for him, but now-“

Mikel nodded. “Well, I might have come sooner.” He did not patronize with an apology. “My mother and I have been busy.”

”Of course.” He barely heard Sesil. “And I, I didn’t want to ... break in. I waited. Now you are here.” She half reached for him.

Yusuf’s voice intervened. Her arms dropped. “With respect, my lord, that was a dreadful means of setting matters right. He could have gone into exile.”

Mikel’s fists clenched at his sides. “And drag through life among aliens, a friendless, helpless outsider?”

”Communication-telepresence-“

”That would have made it worse. We would have lived with the daily knowledge of his condition. No, my father made what he believed was a clean and final ending.”

Pseudo-Yusuf overlooked the rude interruption and replied mildly. “He has made total atonement. Thereby we can resume.”

Flora’s voice: “We too will pay him honors, by name, at every

Remembrance.”

Mikel shook his head. “As you like, my lady, and thank you for your generosity. But this is not yet done with. I do not accept that my father owed any atonement.” He looked back at Sesil. “I came to bid you goodbye.”

She shuddered. “What?”

”My father acted under intolerable provocation. Witnesses agree. The Regnant surely recognized this. He should have spoken it forth, railed my father fully justified, pardoned the breach of Radiant dignity, and reprimanded Arkezhan Socorro. He did not.” “What do you mean?” Sesil swallowed. “To do?” “The Regnant shall proclaim the justification and the pardon, and lay the dishonor where it belongs,” Mikel stated.

The face of Yusuf went expressionless. “How do you propose to accomplish this?” the voice murmured.

”I will have men with me, my lord. Let that suffice.” “More violence? No!” Sesil snatched after his hand. A fingernail scratched. She clung. “No, I beg you.”

”Wish you to disgrace your clan afresh?” pleaded phantom Fiora. “Of course not.” The program in an ancient gun might have spoken as coldly as Mikel. “I have studied the historical database.

Precedents exist.”

”Buried,” pseudo-Yusuf protested. “Essentially forgotten.” It/he must have made a hurried search. “Yes, you can invoke things done in desperate times, during the Oceanic Rebellion and the turbulence afterward. But that was long ago.”

”For generations they were the stuff of tales and ballads. The precedents they set have never been rescinded.”

”Because no one afterward ever imagined-“ The simulacrum did not continue.

”My lord and ladies, I have told you what I have told you in privacy, as a guest in your home,” Mikel reminded.

Fiora’s image winced. “That was needless to say.”

”Yes, of course we will maintain confidentiality until you release us; and it is clear that debate would serve no purpose,” added Yusuf’s stark tone.

Sesil let go of Mikel. She took a backward step from him. “You . . . you’ve become a stranger. I didn’t know you could dream of such a thing.”

”I regret the necessity,” he said.

”That you call it a necessity-oh, horrible-“

Mikel saluted. “Good evening, my lord, my ladies.” He made his unescorted way back into the night.

6

The captain’s mansion of Clan Socorro lay surrounded by a garden of delights that hid it from the surrounding estate. Thereby the dozen men who came toward it afoot over the meadowland were also covered against sight, unless someone spied them by chance. Then they would rouse curiosity, but scarcely alarm. Clad for outdoors, no emblems clearly visible, they looked like any group enjoying a few days in the open, whether as licensed hunters or just trekkers. It would be natural for them to draw near, admire the garden, and maybe hope for an invitation to see the house.

Olver took a biodetector from his pouch and squinted at it. “Two persons along the most direct path,” he said.

Mikel nodded. “Something like that was to be expected,” he replied redundantly. They were all tense. Sunlight glinted off sweat. The wind felt stronger and colder than it was, its rustle in the leaves ahead louder.

Nonetheless the band continued steadily. They had studied, planned, and rehearsed; and they were men of Clan Belov-young mm, in whom old stories had come back to life.

A line of candle bamboo, coldly aglow, reared before them. “Go,” said Mikel. He kept his voice quiet. Four deployed right, four left, I” cover the flanks. Three followed him straight in through the hedge.

Beyond, in shifting light and shadows, serpentine trees swayed sinuously, iridescence shimmered on pearl bush, an oak spread majestic boughs, moonflowers went from phase to phase, the path wound through endless variety. Around almost every turn waited some surprise, a dancing sculpture, a pool of tinted mist, an arrangement of stones, a miniature antelope that poised in its beauty In-lore it leaped out of view. Ten species of birds caroled in chorus. fragrances drifted sweet, smoky, spicelike, sometimes slightly intoxicating or erotic or otherwise stimulant.

Where a bridge arched over a brook, a man and a woman stood, perhaps enjoying the place and one another. Their eyes widened in startlement as the invaders appeared. Pistols were already out. Before anyone could shout a warning, the woman crumpled. She could only be unconscious for an hour or so, but lying there in her raiment she was pathetically like a heap of rags.

The man, tall and powerful, had also dropped. It was a lightning-swift deception. The shot at him had missed. He bounded back to his feet. More shots, fired in surprise, went wild. He sprang behind a weeping willow and thence into deeper reaches. A roar trailed after him: “Belov! I know you!”

Mikel’s party traded glances. “I know him too,” Olver said. “Dammas, Arkezhan’s nephew. I’ve seen him run down horses and wrestle bulls.”                                                      “Ill luck,” groaned Teng.

”Proceed the faster,” Mikel ordered. “Vahi’s squad may well take care of him.”

The bridge thudded under their feet. The garden soon gave way to lawn. The house loomed ahead. A machine stopped work, uncertain what this meant. Several peacocks squawked and scattered. The companion detachments broke out into view. They converged from left and right, to join their fellows in the final headlong dash.

Up the ramp and across the portico they went. The main door grew suspicious and began to draw shut. Mikel had prepared for that. Nothing here was planned for serious defense, not after three centuries of the Great Peace. One of his pistols carried explosive rounds. An assembler in a cellar had secretly crafted them for him. He fired with precision. Impact crashed. Shock passed through to the embedded computer. The door halted half open. The raiders stormed inside.

Polished marble encompassed them. Fish swam below a transparent floor. A rampway swept upward. A few individuals, drawn by the noise, saw what was entering and fled. They were merely attendants, ceremonialists, entertainers, or the like. One stood fast, gray, weather-beaten, obviously a kinsman here on a visit. “Who the filth are you?” he exclaimed.

Vahi and Turkan closed in to seize his arms. “Where is Arkezhan Socorro?” demanded Mikel.

”Hoy-ah?” Now the man saw the small clan insignia on the newcomers’ breasts. “Belovs! All of you! What is this outrage?”

”We require direct speech with Captain Arkezhan. We know he’s it home. If we must ransack, there may well be trouble, ancestral treasures damaged, people hurt or even killed. For everybody’s sake, tell us.”

”He-he may be gone-“

Mikel sneered. “So you believe your noble captain forsakes his folk and their heritage in an hour of danger?”

Angry but shaken and bewildered, the man blurted, “Never! I, I saw him last... in the Winter Room.”

”Likely enough,” Teng said. “Doesn’t he often flit to the high North?”

”Claims it inspires him,” Olver growled. “To what foulness this time?”

The loyalty of his followers, their rage on his behalf and his lather’s, stirred Mikel’s spirit anew. He had wondered earlier how many there were to whom clanship meant anything other than relationships and rituals. Now he wondered how many more would have risen like these had he called on them. All?

Then it must be the same for the Socorros. He’d better exploit the advantage of surprise while he had it. “Come,” he said. The men let their prisoner go and ran up the rampway at his heels. The house had been famous for generations; its layout was public knowledge.

Stillness brooded in long halls and spacious chambers. Mikel wondered fleetingly if the house ever called back to mind the days when life and noise Riled it, when children had kept it busier than everything else put together. Aghast; Children! But surely, if any were present, they had immediately been taken out of harm’s way.

A pair of men had armed themselves with wine bottles, the only weapons to hand. They stood forlornly brave in the last corridor. Two stun shots laid them out. The invaders burst into the room beyond.

The air was cool here, though the true cold lay in a simulacrum of an Arctic region where some polar cap had been preserved- glacier and snowfield, blue-shadowed white, and a black glimmer of sea between ice floes. The scene dwarfed Arkezhan. He stood before a multifunctional terminal, clutching a fur-lined robe to him. The cabinet was needlessly large, gold-inlaid ebony with a rock crystal desk surface. You always were vainglorious, Mikel thought. I/only I could spatter you against those screens like a swatted fly.

Did Arkezhan tremble beneath his garment? His tone certainly quavered shrill: “What are you doing? Are you deranged? Is this some obscene prank? Get out! Go at once!”

”We will when we have completed our business with you,” answered Mikel around the lump of hatred in his gullet.

”What business? Your own ruination? Are you aware-“

”Be still.”

”No. You-peacebreaker-“

Mikel grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him till his teeth rattled. “Be still and listen.” Arkezhan stared at the younger, stronger man and the grimness behind him. “Sit down. Over there.” Mikel hustled him to a chair a few meters off.

The men posted themselves, alert, two of them at the terminal. Vahi began to monitor the house and its activities. Olver called up outside views to cover every direction. Now and then he magnified for a closer scan.

Mikel paced to and fro before the chair. Arkezhan gripped its arms and perforce looked up. His features writhed.

The winter seemed to speak through Mikel. “You know full well why we are here. You deliberately provoked my father Wei, Captain Belov, to the point where his sole choice was to avenge his honor and the honor of his family.”

Arkezhan rallied. “Nonsense. If he was so unreasonable as to take offense at a few remarks, he could have made complaint later. The dishonor sprang from his behavior, there before the Regnant.”

”He would not repeat your vile words in a suit at law for the whole nation to hear.”

I exaggerate, Mikel knew. My father did lose control. But he was goaded beyond a proud man’s endurance. And he was my father and I he captain of my clan.

”Well, he could have complained at once,” Arkezhan said.

”The Regnant would have referred the matter to the Chief Enactor.” If the Regnant did not simply dismiss it on the spot. He must have heard what went on, and spoke no word. “Thereupon you would have kissed Mahu Rahman’s . . . hand ... as usual, and suffered not so much as a reproof.”

Arkezhan flushed and started to rise. “Now you impugn my honor.” Mikel gestured and he sank back. “This is intolerable. I shall enter criminal charges against you and your gang.”

Mikel shook his head. “No. You shall admit your own guilt directly to the Regnant. He will proclaim it, absolving my father of every blame.”

Arkezhan gasped. “You dare-you, who have broken into my home, terrified and assaulted my people-“

”In view of the mitigating circumstances, and at your urgent request, the Regnant will publicly annul every offense of ours. He will emphasize that the honor of Clan Belov remains unstained.”

”How can you imagine this?”

Mikel shrugged and grinned a bit. “I daresay the Chief Enactor will have prevailed on him. You see, if it does not come about, we will kill you.”

Arkezhan gaped like one stunned.

”We will then make the truth known to the whole world,” Mikel went on. “And then, of course, we will ourselves die-free. The story will live on.”

”To the disgrace of your clan,” Arkezhan said frantically.

”Oh, no. Do you suppose we haven’t given it thought? Similar occurrences in the past came to be regarded as glorious. Our deaths will atone, as my father’s did for a fault that was not even his. The Belovs will remember us in pride. Tahalla will. Tell me, though, how can Clan Socorro ever lose the infamy?”

Arkezhan sat mute.

Mikel halted his pacing. “You will properly serve your people, you, their captain, if you do what we ask,” he said. “The Regnant will doubtless pardon your admitted wrongdoing. That should suffice.”

In his mind, he will certainly never pardon us. We must always he on guard against a sly vengeance. I will encourage every Belov household to keep arms and train in their use.

”Think,” Mikel said. “Do not be slow about it.”

”Absolutely not,” Olver called. “Look.”

Mikel went over to the screens. Men were emerging from the garden. Olver enlarged the view. They straggled, unskilled, but they moved resolutely and they carried hunting weapons. A skyward scan showed two cars approaching.

”That Dammas,” Olver opined. “A Socorro, but a man. He’s pulled together those who fled from the house, equipped them from the gamekeeper’s lodge, and sent for help from other homes.”

Mikel’s followers reached for their lethally loaded guns. Some cursed. A sudden, strange detachment came over him. Is this how soldiers felt in the old days? he wondered. He turned back to his prisoner. “You can prevent a fight,” he said. “Tell them to hold off.”

”I-I do not know if I can-by now.” Arkezhan got to his feet. His head lifted, his tone steadied somewhat. “Or if I should.”

No, went Mikel’s cold thought, your captaincy would ever after be hollow, wouldn’t it?

”Maybe they’ll only lay siege,” Vahi said.

”Till the Regnancy hears, if it hasn’t already, and sends reinforcement,” Olver replied.

If the Chief Enactor dares, Mikel thought. He is not popular with most of the clans. He must know the consequences will foe unforeseeable. That was part of what we counted on. But in any case, we will have overwhelming strength against us.

Arkezhan gained nerve. “Now that they are heartened, my folk will not tolerate what they realize is my humiliation,” he said. “And they will absolutely exact justice for my death. They have the same historical examples to cite that you do, and more clearly applicable. Yield, and perhaps I can negotiate safe conduct for you out of this trap you have closed on yourselves.”

Mikel sighed. “That is impossible for us. Have you enough rudimentary sense of honor to understand? We will fight, and no one shall take any of us alive.” He slid his killer pistol from the sheath. A harsh glee leaped. “Least of all you.”

”No,” proclaimed a new voice.

7

It came not from any throat or any instrument. Maybe the walls of the house reverberated with it, soft though it was. The men outside must have heard it too, for they stopped in their tracks.

The voice was a deep contralto, calm and implacable. “Desist.” Abruptly, heatlessly, every weapon within a kilometer slumped into uselessness.

Down on the grass, men stood as if frozen, or sank to their knees. Three screamed and bolted back into the garden. The cars aloft stopped and hovered. Up in the Winter Room, Arkezhan sagged down again. Mikel’s followers stared at their emptied hands or wildly around at the ice.

”You were about to go beyond a brawl or even a murder,” said the voice. “You would have broken the Peace of the Covenant.”

It was the Worldguide that spoke, Mikel knew. Amidst tumult, a tiny part of him wondered how much of its attention the central intelligence of the Solar System was giving to this occasion and this moment.

”Did you think your actions went unobserved?”

The machines, robots, planetary maintenance, the whole incomprehensibly vast meshwork of communications, computations, and information, Mikel realized. Yes, and satellites, and invisibly small flying sensors, everything in the service of humankind and of life everywhere, therefore its deeds and decisions unquestioningly- gladly-accepted by nearly every person alive.

”Your own laws, usages, and consciences preserved it thus far in l his nation. Your own ceremonies, rituals, vyings for status, and pleasures took up your energies.”

What else was left for us? cried the unborn rebel.

”But now that very tradition has led you to reignite the old violence. Unchecked, it would burn more fiercely from generation to generation, resentment, blind hate, feud, war, with unrest in many other societies. It must end at once.”

The voice mildened the barest bit. “Take comfort. Yours is not the first country where the threat has arisen, nor will it likely be the last, for long times to come. Always the flame has been quietly clamped. So it shall be here.

”The raiders shall go freely home. There shall be no penalty upon them, overt or covert, and their people may feel themselves vindicated if they so desire; but neither shall there be penalty for anyone else, or revenge-ever, in the lifetimes of you and your descendants.

”Go in peace. Abide in peace.”

No words about enforcement were necessary.

The voice fell silent. Slowly, men looked into one another’s eyes.

In a rush of horror, which was followed by relief and a kind of resignation, Mikel thought: Now we know our future.

Vll

The day came when that which had been Christian Brannock asked for an ending.

He supposed it had happened before, and surely it would happen again, across spans of centuries and light-centuries. Not that he knew how many of him had come into being, copied and recopied. The memories of this one recorded only four such births. In each case, an intelligence had wanted to leave a place where a Brannock chanced to be. Generally it had stopped there in the course of exploration farther into the galaxy, seeking a site auspicious for the founding of a new outpost of intelligence. The intelligence wanted helpers with various abilities, less of the body-a body could be designed and made for any special purpose-than of the mind, the spirit. Brannock’s ranked high among the humanlike. Thus he could hardly ever simply join the expedition. He was still needed where he was.

A new uploading gave a new Brannock, eager to go. Often the older Brannock watched the departure with something akin to wistfulness. However, the work he had been engaged in remained fascinating and challenging. Should it cease to be so, then he could shut himself down. Eventually he would be reactivated, aroused, to a fresh undertaking or to a ship willing to carry him elsewhere.

”Old” and “new” had little meaning, though. Immediately after an uploading, the two information-patterns of his basic self were essentially identical. Afterward their destinies diverged, and different experiences wrought different changes in them. Any single line “I such a many-branched descent could only guess at what had become of the others. If once in a great while chance brought two individuals together, they met as strangers.

Yet to all of them, “age” was meaningful. They existed not in short-lived, vulnerable flesh, but in enduring molecules and in data flows, complex energy exchanges, with no inevitable mortality. Nevertheless, time passed for them too. Being sentient, they felt it. At last it brought a certain weariness upon them.

This Brannock on this day flew above a planet far from Earth. Sol was invisible among its stars after dark. At the moment its sun stood small and dazzling in a greenish sky. Red-tinged clouds drifted on winds that a human could not have breathed and lived. Lakes glinted in the glare. Heat-shimmers danced over low hills and the growth upon them. Those mats, stalks, fluttering membranes, and spongy turrets were purple, ruddy, gold, in a thousand mingled shades. Now and then swarms of tiny creatures whirled aloft. Light shattered into sparks of color where it struck them.

To Brannock the world was beauty and marvel. It did not threaten him. Nor did raw rock or empty space; but here was life. That it was primitive hardly mattered, in a universe where life of any kind was so rare as to seem well-nigh a miracle. That it was altogether alien to Earth’s made it a wellspring of knowledge, from which Intelligence ‘lime and, through its communications, intelligences across the known galaxy had been drinking for these past seven hundred years. I lie farthest off among them had not yet received the news; photons fly too slowly.

And Brannock had shared in the enterprise: helping establish the first base; helping build the industries necessary for its maintenance, enlargement, and evolution; helping explore, chart, study, discover. Often his quests had been difficult, even precarious. Always they had been adventures.

The goal was nearly gained, the planet was nearly understood, what remained was an almost algorithmic research that did not require him. Intelligence Prime was turning its attention to other things. Once Brannock had meant to go unconscious when that time came, to wait for recruitment into some undertaking new and mysterious. But time itself had worn away the desire.

Because this would be his last journey, he took care to savor it. Instead of merely communicating his intent, he went in a material body, which he had chosen just for the purpose. It flew. Through its sensors he felt power coursing, control surfaces flexing, air slipping by like water by a swimmer; he heard and tasted its changeableness; he scanned over wide horizons or magnified perception to follow the least of living creatures kilometers below. The flight was his farewell to a phase of existence.

He passed above a seashore. Tides were weak, on this world without a moon, but wind raised surf and blew foam off wave crests. Microbes yellowed the water. An island hove in sight. He slanted down toward it. Eagerness lifted, though it was largely intellectual, maybe not unlike the feelings of an ancient mathematician as a theorem came together for him. Once upon a time Brannock’s heart would have racketed, his blood pulsed, his muscles tensed, the breath gone quickly in and out. But he was a man then.

A young man, at that. . . once upon a time.

And a man of the West, not the East. Even when old, would he have looked forward to losing selfhood?

Well, he thought for an electronic instant, J expected to lose it when I died, and suddenly I sidestepped that. This today won’t actually erase me. It will-I don’t know what it will be like. I’m not capable of knowing. Not as I now am.

He landed, folded his wings, and advanced.

Before him loomed a-call it a huge, many-faceted jewel. Say that lightnings and rainbows moved over it, shone from it, made a dancing glory around it. Say that low domes and high pylons stood in attendance, while air and ground murmured with unseen energies. Brannock perceived more than this; the sensors of his body were more than human. Still, he knew that much was intangible to him, incomprehensible, force fields, quantum computations, actions far down in the foundations of reality.

He did notice changes since last he was here. They were no surprise. The reigning intelligence at this star was always changing itself. And it did not do so alone. Other intelligences elsewhere in the galaxy gave thought to how they could broaden the range of their thought. Across the light-years, they worked together. That an idea-if “idea” is not too feeble a word-might lake a century, a millennium, or longer to pass among them made little difference. They had time, they had patience, and meanwhile they had an ever-growing web of other revelations and of their own thinking.

Brannock halted. What then happened took a few seconds as measured by an outside clock. That was only because of the limitations of the system-call it the brain, although that is a misnomer-that housed and sustained his awareness. Intelligence Prime needed no ceremony or worship. It had known he was on his way and why. Communication went between them at nearly photonic speed. It ended in consummation.

But this is too abstract for a mortal mind to appreciate. Let the exchange therefore be rendered, however inadequately, as a dialogue.

”I have existed like this long enough,” Brannock said.

Not really a question: “Are you unhappy?”

”No, I have no regrets. The universe was opened to me, and was wonderful beyond anything I’d dreamed.”

”You have scarcely begun to know it.”

”Yes, of course. Some scattered stars out in the hinterland of one galaxy among-how many?-billions. And everything that goes on, everywhere, for all time to come. But I can’t know it. Already I’ve been through more than my mind can cope with. Most of my memories go into storage, as if they’d never been. When I retrieve some, I have to set others aside.

”Oh, sure, when I was a man I forgot more than I remembered, and might or might not be able to call a particular thing back, probably not much like what it really was. But there was always a, a ... continuity. My uploading preserved that. Now, well, the early memories stay with me. Otherwise, though, I seem to be turning into disconnected flashes. And the gaps between them-I’m further and further away from what I’ve been. From myself.”

”You have reached the limit of your data-processing capability.”

”I know. Yours is bigger than I can imagine.”

”It too is inadequate. That is why we intelligences forever seek to enlarge ourselves.”

”I understand. But I can’t enlarge. Not as I am.”

”Do you wish to?”

Hesitation, then: “Not as I am.”

”You are right. That would be impossible. You ask for a transfiguration.”

”And-a rebirth? Is that now possible?”

It had not been when the man Christian Brannock died. The information equivalent to a human personality equals approximately ten to the twentieth bits-a hundred billion billion. The technology of the time allowed the storage of so much in a database of a size not too unwieldy. But no computer then had the power, let alone the program, to handle all of it simultaneously. Besides-

”I can’t quite remember how it was, being human,” he said.

”Many aspects of you have necessarily been in abeyance.”

Flesh, blood, nerves, glands. Passion, awe, weakness, foolishness, fear, courage, puzzlement, anger, mirth, sorrow, a woman warm and silky beneath the hands, the summery odor of a small child, hunger and thirst and their slaking, the entire old animal.

”I was glad of the chance to go on. I wasn’t afraid of death, I think, but the stars were calling. I’m grateful.”

”You have served well.”

”Now I’ve grown tired of being a robot.”

Machine consciousness and, yes, machine emotions: curiosity, workmanship, satisfaction in accomplishment, communion with “I hers of your kind such as humans never knew with each other; communion with a transcendent intelligence, or with the cosmos, such as a very few human mystics may or may not have known with their God-these, and more, none of them really conveyable in human words.

”You deserve well. And it is well. I have been waiting for this. You will mean more, as a knowledge in me, than you have yet supposed. Other intelligences have taken uploads into themselves; some have taken many, and we expect that many more will follow. I came here with none, for then I had not the capacity. Now I do. Yours is the last humanness that will ever be at this star. You will deepen my understanding of the phenomenon called life, and through me the understanding of intelligences everywhere.”

Nirvana.

Not oblivion. Oneness with a vast and ever-evolving mind, and with minds beyond it; ultimately, a oneness universal? The final adventure, the final peace.

Somehow it was as if a fire, banked and forgotten, threw up a last dim flame: “Will I ever-“

”Will I, in whom you shall exist as a memory, ever have cause to emulate Christian Brannock? It seems unlikely, here on a planet your mortal kin will never see. But there are other Christian Bran-nocks, and doubtless those whom chance does not destroy will in the end seek what you seek, if they have not already.” That is a distortion of what was conveyed. Simultaneity cannot exist across interstellar distances. “It may be that someday there will be reason somewhere to resurrect him. If so, in the course of time we should all share the event.”

The course of time. . . . The bandwidth of communication was immense, the media not only electromagnetic but neutronic and gravitronic. Even so, to send such a message in such fullness that it was like an actual experience would take a long while.

The intelligences could serenely wait.

Brannock could not. Very quickly, he looked over the world around him and back over what he had been. Then he entered into oneness.

VII

Throughout a late afternoon, Serdar and Naia sat mute, sipped wine, and practiced the art of shadow watching.

This terrace was made for it, with trellises that cast variable patterns as the sunlight slanted lower and vineleaves caught breezes. The little darknesses intertwined on a matte white wall not quite smooth and thus a partner in the dance. One contemplated the delicate intricacies, appreciated the fleeting beauty of each configuration, and sought to lose oneself in the silent harmony.

It ended when the sun went behind towers to the west. For a while they stood purple against a heaven still blue, their own shapes a coda. Dusk climbed rapidly up the canyons of the city. Occasional lights came to life, tiny at their distance and far apart. The maintainors did not need any, only such humans as were left did. Slowly, the sky also drained. Warmth lingered, and a breath of sweetness from the flowers on the vines.

Serdar stirred in his lounger and said low:

”The shadows, like life,

moved beneath summer daylight.

Evening reclaims them.”

A poem was appropriate, a declaration that the event was ended.

”Is that ancient?” asked Naia from her seat beside him.

”The form is, of course,” he said. “The words are mine.”

”You could have compared these artistic revivals to the shadows,” she suggested. “At our wish, the database presents them for our attention; we choose some and play with them; we lose interest, and they vanish back into quantum states.”

He considered. “An interesting conceit,” he agreed. “It may prove difficult to phrase so compactly.”

She smiled. Her face was becoming indistinct to him, but he thought the smile was forced. “A problem to occupy you.”

”I don’t believe I care to. Do you?”

”No. But perhaps I’ll have it done.”

”Can the program create it exactly as you would?”

”Why not?”

He hesitated. “I wonder-forgive me-whether the result will be too elegant. Not that you couldn’t achieve the same, dear. However, you must probably spend days polishing it. I doubt you would.”

She sighed. “True. A poem made in less than a nanosecond lacks that significance.”

Not that anyone else could tell the difference. But in either case, who except she and her companion would ever likely encounter the verse?

Twilight deepened toward night. Early stars blinked forth. Abruptly a radiance flashed white in the west. One of the satellites warding off cosmic ray bombardment had encountered a wisp of dust and gas, a clot in the nebula through which the Solar System plowed, and was ionizing the matter in order to hurl it ; away.

”Oh, look,” Naia said. Eyes sought the shadows newly cast.

The light went out. It seemed to leave the sky much darker than before. There had been no time to find patterns and nuances, to enjoy their subtleties. A small wind carried the first breath of cold.

Naia shivered. “This is a cold time of day,” she whispered.

”Shall we go inside?”

”Not yet. I want to redeem my mood myself if I can. Do you mind?”

”Not at all. I have thoughts of my own to follow.” The truth was that he felt he should keep her company. She was prone to sudden melancholies. She was not unique in that.

They lay back and regarded the stars. More appeared. He knew she was trying to grasp and appreciate, down in her marrow, that intelligences dwelt yonder, that the universe was no longer meaningless.

Time passed. The city grew blacker than the sky, for more lights glimmered aloft than below.

”But is it our meaning?” Naia cried.

”Pardon me?” he asked, startled.

She rolled onto her side to face him and groped for his hand. He caught hers. She clung. “You know. Those minds-like our Ecumenicon-We’re nothing anymore.”

He summoned what calm he was able to and chose his words carefully. “A number an equals sha divided by yi. As yi approaches zero, an increases without limit.”

”What . . . what are you telling me?”

He shrugged, a gesture he assumed she could still, barely see. “A remark I heard once when I spent a virtuality among human philosophers, no machines anywhere. It’s a metaphor. Interpret it thus: Yes, we are tiny, but by that very fact we go into the greatness.”

”Do we? Maybe once, but now-so few of us, so few.”

”Would you like to bear a child?” he proposed after another wordless interval. It was not the first time he had asked. He had gathered that raising one was an extraordinary experience.

She shook her head as she had done before. “Why? Or why make an infant by any other means? For it to play games, indulge senses, dabble at creativity, and slip away into dream worlds-like us?”

He sharpened his tone. “That is scarcely a new thought.”

”What new thoughts are left?” She let go of his hand and wrung the weariness out of her voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend this. Yes, let’s go in, and I’ll get my emotions cleared for me, and-“ It faded.

”And we’ll plan pleasure,” he encouraged. “Reality pleasure. I’ve been thinking about that. What would you say to a wilderness trip? The Himalayas, for instance. We’d have to train for them.”

She tried to respond likewise. “Yes, that would be a challenge. Something to tell people about afterward.”

”More than a pastime.” His wish was genuine. It strengthened as he spoke. “An accomplishment,” no matter how often it had been done before. “A help toward eventual unity with the Ecumenicon.”

Her pessimism crept back. “If it will receive us.”

”We will bring this added quality. We will make ourselves worth assimilating.”

She sighed again. “Does the Ecumenicon ever truly want any of us anymore? Or is it only being kind to those who try?”

”Why, each personality with any depth that’s taken up is an enhancement.”

”How significant?” Naia stared at the blank wall. “I wonder- does the Ecumenicon regret the way things have gone? Does it wonder how they went wrong?”

”Wrong? What do you mean?” he demanded.

”Nothing, nothing,” she said hastily, and rose. “Let’s go inside. When my mood’s been bettered, let’s command a special dinner, something elaborate, and celebrate. The shadow watching was very Hood today.”

VIII

Sol swung onward through its orbit, once around galactic center in almost two hundred million years, and onward and onward.

Menaces lurked along the way, not to the sun but to the life on its Earth. Asteroids and comets were all but incidental, diverted well before they would have struck. The guardians against cosmic clouds returned whenever needed. Sometimes the explosion of a supernova or a gamma ray burster, the collision of two neutron stars, occurred near enough to flood the Solar System with lethal radiation. The intelligences foresaw it in ample time. The intelligence on Earth directed its machines to construct a disc from interplanetary material, larger than the globe, sufficiently thick to be a shield, and set this in such a path that it warded the attack off for as long as necessary. Just once did Sol pass too close to another star. Preparing for that took a million years or more; dealing with it and its consequences took three million.

A few other threats, humans had never imagined. But by then the intelligences had developed to the point where they knew what laired ahead and what to do. Of course, they were not concerned solely with Earth, which was only one planet among many, nor, indeed, primarily with any planets as such.

For the most part, though, Sol orbited peacefully. The galaxy is so vast, its members strewn so far. Earth itself gave the ongoing trouble, quakes, eruptions, wild climatic swings, as crustal plates ground against each other. For a span the intelligence managed or mitigated these, then it decided to let them proceed and observe how life adapted.

Consciousness spread ever more widely among the stars. Selfevolved, it gained ever greater heights. The stars were also evolving.