PART TWO

Was it her I ought to have loved...?

PlET HElN

I

No human could have shaped the thoughts or uttered them. They had no real beginning, they had been latent for millennium after millennium while the galactic brain was growing. Sometimes they passed from mind to mind, years or decades through space at the speed of light, nanoseconds to receive, comprehend, consider, and send a message on outward. But there was so much else-a cosmos of realities, an infinity of virtualities and abstract creations-that remembrances of Earth were the barest undertone, intermittent and fleeting, among uncounted billions of other incidentals. Most of the grand awareness was directed elsewhere, much of it intent on its own evolution.

For the galactic brain was still in infancy: unless it held itself to be still a-borning. By now its members were strewn from end to end of the spiral arms, out into the halo and the nearer star-gatherings, as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The seeds of fresh ones drifted farther yet; some had reached the shores of the Andromeda.

Each was a local complex of organisms, machines, and their interrelationships. (“Organism” seems best for something that maintains itself, reproduces at need, and possesses a consciousness in a range from the rudimentary to the transcendent, even though carbon compounds be a very small of its material components and most of its life processes take place directly on the quantum level.) They numbered in the many millions, and the number was rising steeply, also within the Milky Way, as the founders of new generations arrived at new homes.

Thus the galactic brain was in perpetual growth, which from a cosmic viewpoint had barely started. Thought had just had time for a thousand or two journeys across its ever-expanding breadth. It would never absorb its members into itself; they would always remain individuals, developing along their individual lines. Let us therefore call them not cells, but nodes.

For they were in truth distinct. Each had more uniquenesses than were ever possible to a protoplasmic creature. Chaos and quantum fluctuation assured that none would exactly resemble any predecessor. Environment likewise helped shape the personality- surface conditions (what kind of planet, moon, asteroid, comet?) or free orbit, sun single or multiple (what kinds, what ages?), nebula, interstellar space and its ghostly tides. . . . Then, too, a node was not a single mind. It was as many as it chose to be, freely awakened and freely set aside, proteanly intermingling and separating again, using whatever bodies and sensors it wished for as long as it wished, immortally experiencing, creating, meditating, seeking a fulfillment that the search itself brought forth.

Hence, while every node was engaged with a myriad of matters, one might be especially developing new realms of mathematics, another composing glorious works that cannot really be likened to music, another observing the destiny of organic life on some world, life that it had perhaps fabricated for that purpose, another-Human words are useless.

Always, though, the nodes were in continuous communication over the light-years, communication on tremendous bandwidths of every possible medium. This was the galactic brain. That unity, that selfhood that was slowly coalescing, might spend millions of years contemplating a thought; but the thought would be as vast as the thinker, in whose sight an eon was as a day and a day was as an eon.

Already now, in its nascence, it affected the course of the universe. The time came when a node fully recalled Earth. That memory went out to others as part of the ongoing flow of information, ideas, feelings, reveries, and who knows what else? Certain of these others decided the subject was worth pursuing, and relayed it on their own message-streams. In this wise it passed through light-years and centuries, circulated, developed, and at last became a decision, which reached the node best able to take action.

Here the event has been related in words, ill-suited though they .ire to the task. They fail totally when they come to what happened next. How shall they tell of the dialogue of a mind with itself, when that thinking was a progression of quantum flickerings through configurations as intricate as the wave functions, when the computational power and database were so huge that measures become meaningless, when the mind raised aspects of itself to interact like persons until it drew them back into its wholeness, and when every-thing was said within microseconds of planetary time?

It is impossible, except vaguely and misleadingly. Ancient humans used the language of myth for that which they could not fathom. The sun was a fiery chariot daily crossing heaven, the year .1 god who died and was reborn, death a punishment for ancestral sin. Let us make our myth concerning the mission to Earth.

Think, then, of the primary aspect of the node’s primary consciousness as if it were a single mighty entity, and name it Alpha.

Think of a lesser manifestation of itself that it had synthesized and intended to release into separate existence as a second entity. For reasons that will become clear, imagine the latter masculine and name it Wayfarer.

All is myth and metaphor, beginning with this absurd nomenclature. Beings like these had no names. They had identities, instantly recognizable by others of their kind. They did not speak together, they did not go through discussion or explanation of any sort, the\ were not yet “they.” But imagine it.

Imagine, too, their surroundings, not as perceived by their manifold sensors or conceptualized by their awarenesses and emotions, but as if human sense organs were reporting to a human brain. Such a picture is scarcely a sketch. Too much that was basic could not have registered. However, a human at an astronomical distance-could have seen an M2 dwarf star about fifty parsecs from Sol, and ascertained that it had planets. She could have detected signs ol’ immense, enigmatic energies, and wondered.

In itself, the sun was undistinguished. The galaxy held billions like it. Long ago, an artificial intelligence-at that dawn stage ol evolution, this was the best phrase-had established itself there because one of the planets bore curious life forms worth studying. That research went on through the megayears. Meanwhile the ever-heightening intelligence followed more and more different interests: above all, its self-evolution. That the sun would stay cool for an enormous length of time had been another consideration. The node did not want the trouble of coping with great environmental change’s before it absolutely must.

Since then, stars had changed their relative positions. This now was the settlement nearest to Sol. Suns closer still were of less interest and had merely been visited, if that. Occasionally a free-space, dirigible node had passed through the neighborhood, but none chanced to be there at this epoch.

Relevant to our myth is the fact that no thinking species ever appeared on the viviferous world. Life is statistically uncommon in the cosmos, sapience almost vanishingly rare, therefore doubly precious.

Our imaginary human would have seen the sun as autumnally yellow, burning low and peacefully. Besides its planets and lesser natural attendants, various titanic structures orbited about it. From afar, they seemed like gossamer or like intricate spiderwebs agleam athwart the stars; most of what they were was force fields. They gathered and focused the energies that Alpha required, they searched the deeps of space and the atom, they transmitted and received the thought-flow that was becoming the galactic brain; what more they did lies beyond the myth.

Within their complexity, although not at any specific location, lived Alpha, its apex. Likewise, for the moment, did Wayfarer.

Imagine a stately voice: “Welcome into being. Yours is a high and, it may be, dangerous errand. Are you willing?”

If Wayfarer hesitated an instant, that was not from fear of suffering harm but from fear of inflicting it. “Tell me. Help me to understand.”

”Sol-“ the sun of old Earth, steadily heating since first it took shape, would continue stable for billions of years before it exhausted i lie hydrogen fuel at its core and swelled into a red giant. But-

A swift computation. “Yes. I see.” Above a threshold level of radiation input, the geochemical and biochemical cycles that had maintained the temperature of Earth would be overwhelmed. Increasing warmth put increasing amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, and it is a potent greenhouse gas. Heavier cloud cover, raising the albedo, could only postpone a day of catastrophe. Rising above it, water molecules were split by hard sunlight into hydrogen, which escaped to space, and oxygen, which bound to surface materials. Raging fires released monstrous tonnages of carbon dioxide, as did rocks exposed to erosion in desiccated lands. It is the second major greenhouse gas. The time must come when the last oceans boiled away, leaving a globe akin to Venus; but well before then, life on Earth would be no more than a memory in the quantum consciousnesses. “When will total extinction occur?”

”On the order of a hundred thousand years futureward.” Pain bit through the small facet of Wayfarer that came from Christian Brannock. He had most passionately loved his living world. Its latter-day insignificance had never changed this, nor had his own latter-day lack of uniqueness. Copies of his uploaded mind had become integral with awarenesses across the galaxy. So had the minds of millions of his fellow humans, ordinarily as unnoticed as single genes had been in their own bodies when their flesh was alive, and yet basic elements of the whole. Ransacking its database, Alpha had found the record of Christian Brannock and chosen to weave him-as a very partial individual, a single twig on a mighty tree-into the essence of Wayfarer, rather than someone else. The judgment was-call it intuitive.

”Can’t you say more closely?” Wayfarer-Brannock appealed. “No,” replied Alpha. “The uncertainties and imponderables arc too many. Gaia,” mythic name for the node in the Solar System, “has responded to inquiries evasively when at all.”

”Have . . . we . . . really been this slow to think about Earth?”

”We had much else to think about and do, did we not? Gaia could at any time have requested special consideration. She never did. Thus the matter did not appear to be of major importance. Human Earth is preserved in memory. What is posthuman Earth but a planet approaching the postbiological phase?

”True, the scarcity of spontaneously evolved biomes makes the case interesting. However, Gaia has presumably been observing and gathering the data, for the rest of us to examine whenever we wish. I he Solar System has seldom had visitors. The last was two million years ago. Since then, Gaia has joined less and less in our fellowship; her communications have grown sparse and perfunctory. But such withdrawals are not unknown. A node may, for example, want to pursue a philosophical concept undisturbed, until it is ready for general contemplation. In short, nothing called Earth to our attention.”

”I would have remembered,” whispered Christian Brannock.

”What finally reminded us?” asked Wayfarer.

”The idea that Earth may be worth saving. Perhaps it holds more than Gaia knows of”-a pause-“or has told of. If nothing else, sentimental value.”

”Yes, I understand,” said Christian Brannock.

”Moreover, and potentially more consequential, we may well have experience to gain, a precedent to set. If awareness is to survive the mortality of the stars, it must make the universe over. That work of billions or trillions of years will begin with some small, experimental undertaking. Shall it be now,” the “now” of deathless beings already geologically old, “at Earth?”

”Not small,” murmured Wayfarer. Christian Brannock had been an engineer.

”No,” agreed Alpha. “Given the time constraint, only the re sources of a few stars will be available. Nevertheless, we have various possibilities open to us, if we commence soon enough. The question is which would be the best-and, first, whether we should act.

”Will you go seek an answer?”

”Yes,” responded Wayfarer, and “Yes, oh, God damn, yes,” cried Christian Brannock.

2

A spaceship departed for Sol. A laser accelerated it close to the speed of light, energized by the sun and controlled by a network ol interplanetary dimensions. If necessary, the ship could decelerate itself at journey’s end, travel freely about, and return unaided, albeit more slowly. Its cryomagnetics supported a good-sized ball of antimatter, and its total mass was slight. The material payload amounted simply to: a matrix, plus backup, for running the Wayfarer programs and containing a database deemed sufficient; assorted sensors and effectors; several bodies of different capabilities, into which he could download an essence of himself; miscellaneous equipment and power systems; a variety of instruments; and a thins ages forgotten, which Wayfarer had ordered molecules to make ;it the wish of Christian Brannock. He might somewhere find time and fingers for it. A guitar.

II

There was a man called Kalava, a sea captain of Sirsu. His clan was the Samayoki. In youth he had fought well at Broken Mountain, where the armies of Ulonai met the barbarian invaders swarming north out of the desert and cast them back with fearsome losses. He then became a mariner. When the Ulonaian League fell apart and the alliances led by Sirsu and Irrulen raged across the land, year after year, seeking each other’s throats, Kalava sank enemy ships, burned enemy villages, bore treasure and captives off to market.

After the grudgingly made, unsatisfactory Peace of Tuopai, he went into trade. Besides going up and down the River Lonna and around the Gulf of Sirsu, he often sailed along the North Coast, bartering as he went, then out over the Windroad Sea to the colonies on the Ending Islands. At last, with three ships, he followed that coast east through distances hitherto unknown. Living off the waters and what hunting parties could bring from shore, dealing or fighting with the wild tribes they met, in the course of months he and his crews came to where the land bent south. A ways beyond that they found a port belonging to the fabled people of the Shining Fields. They abode for a year and returned carrying wares that at nine made them rich.

From his clan Kalava got leasehold of a thorp and good farmland in the Lonna delta, about a day’s travel from Sirsu. He meant to settle down, honored and comfortable. But that was not in tin thought of the gods nor in his nature. He was soon quarreling with all his neighbors, until his wife’s brother grossly insulted him and he killed the man. Thereupon she left him. At the clanmoot that composed the matter she received a third of the family wealth, in gold and moveables. Their daughters and the husbands of these sided with her.

Of Kalava’s three sons, the eldest had drowned in a storm at sea the next died of the Black Blood; the third, faring as an apprentice on a merchant vessel far south to Zhir, fell while resisting robbers in sand-drifted streets under the time-gnawed colonnades of an abandoned city. They left no children, unless by slaves. Nor would Kalava, now; no free woman took his offers of marriage. What he had gathered through a hard lifetime would fall to kinfolk who hated him. Most folk in Sirsu shunned him too.

Long he brooded, until a dream hatched. When he knew it for what it was, he set about his preparations, more quietly than might have been awaited. Once the business was under way, though not too far along for him to drop if he must, he sought Ilyandi the skythinker.

She dwelt on Council Heights. There did the Vilkui meet each year for rites and conference. But when the rest of them had dispersed again to carry on their vocation-dream interpreters, scribes, physicians, mediators, vessels of olden lore and learning, teachers of the young-Ilyandi remained. Here she could best search the heavens and seek for the meaning of what she found, on a high place sacred to all Ulonai.

Up the Spirit Way rumbled Kalava’s chariot. Near the top, the trees that lined it, goldfruit and plume, stood well apart, giving him a clear view. Bushes grew sparse and low on the stony slopes, here I he dusty green of vasi, there a shaggy hairleaf, yonder a scarlet fireflower. Scorchwort lent its acrid smell to a wind blowing hot and slow off the Gulf. That water shone, tarnished metal, westward beyond sight, under a silver-gray overcast beneath which scudded rags of darker cloud. A rainstorm stood on the horizon, blurred murk and flutters of lightning-light.

Elsewhere reached the land, bloomgrain ripening yellow, dun paperleaf, verdant pastures for herdlings, violet richen orchards, tall stands of shipwood. Farmhouses and their outbuildings lay widely strewn. The weather having been dry of late, dust whirled up from the roads winding among them to veil wagons and trains of porters. Regally from its sources eastward in Wilderland flowed the Lonna, arms fanning out north and south.

Sirsu lifted battlemented walls on the right bank of the main stream, tiny in Kalava’s eyes at its distance. Yet he knew it, he could pick out famous works, the Grand Fountain in King’s Newmarket, the frieze-bordered portico of the Flame Temple, the triumphal column in Victory Square, and he knew where the wrights had their workshops, the merchants their bazaars, the innkeepers their houses for a seaman to find a jug and a wench. Brick, sandstone, granite, marble mingled their colors softly together. Ships and boats plied the water or were docked under the walls. On the opposite shore sprawled mansions and gardens of the Helki suburb, their rooftiles fanciful as jewels.

It was remote from that which he approached.

Below a great arch, two postulants in blue robes slanted their staffs across the way and called: “In the name of the Mystery, stop, make reverence, and declare yourself!”

Their young voices rang high, unawed by a sight that had daunted warriors. Kalava was a big man, wide-shouldered and thick-muscled. Weather had darkened his skin to the hue of coal and bleached nearly white the hair that fell in braids halfway down his back. As black were the eyes that gleamed below a shelf of brow, in a face rugged, battered, and scarred. His mustache curved down past the jaw, dyed red. Traveling in peace, he wore simply a knee-length kirtle, green and trimmed with kivi skin, each scale polished, and buskins; but gold coiled around his arms and a sword was belted at his hip. Likewise did a spear stand socketed in the chariot, pennon flapping, while a shield slatted at the rail and an ax hung ready to be thrown. Four matched slaves drew the car. Their line had been bred for generations to be draft creatures-huge, long-legged, spirited, yet trustworthy after the males were gelded. Sweat sheened over Kalava’s brand on the small, bald heads and ran down naked bodies. Nonetheless they breathed easily and the smell of them was rather sweet.

Their owner roared, “Halt!” For a moment only the wind had sound or motion. Then Kalava touched his brow below the headband and recited the Confession: “What a man knows is little, what he understands is less, therefore let him bow down to wisdom.” Himself, he trusted more in blood sacrifices and still more in his own strength; but he kept a decent respect for the Vilkui.

”I seek counsel from the skythinker Ilyandi,” he said. That was hardly needful, when no other initiate of her order was present.

”All may seek who are not attainted of ill-doing,” replied the senior boy as ceremoniously.

”Ruvio bear witness that any judgments against me stand satisfied.” The Thunderer was the favorite god of most mariners.

”Enter, then, and we shall convey your request to our lady.”

The junior boy led Kalava across the outer court. Wheels rattled loud on flagstones. At the guesthouse, he helped stall, feed, and water the slaves, before he showed the newcomer to a room that in the high season slept two-score men. Elsewhere in the building were a bath, a refectory, ready food-dried meat, fruit, and flatbread-with richenberry wine. Kalava also found a book. After refreshment, he sat down on a bench to pass the time with it.

He was disappointed. He had never had many chances or much desire to read, so his skill was limited; and the copyist for this codex had used a style of lettering obsolete nowadays. Worse, the text was a chronicle of the emperors of Zhir. That was not just painful to him-oh, Eneio, his son, his last son!-but valueless. True, the Vilkui taught that civilization had come to Ulonai from Zhir. What of it? How many centuries had fled since the desert claimed that realm? What were the descendants of its dwellers but starveling nomads and pestiferous bandits?

Well, Kalava thought, yes, this could be a timely warning, a reminder to people of how the desert still marched northward. But was what they could see not enough? He had passed by towns not very far south, flourishing in his grandfather’s time, now empty, crumbling houses half buried in dust, glassless windows like the eye sockets in a skull.

His mouth tightened. He would not meekly abide any doom.

Day was near an end when an acolyte of Ilyandi’s came to say that she would receive him. Walking with his guide, he saw purple dusk shade toward night in the east. In the west the storm had ended, leaving that part of heaven clear for a while. The sun was plainly visible, though mists turned it into a red-orange step pyramid. From the horizon it cast a bridge of fire over the Gulf and sent great streamers of light aloft into cloudbanks that glowed sulfurous. A whistlewing passed like a shadow across them. The sound of its flight keened faintly down through air growing less hot. Otherwise a holy silence rested upon the heights.

Three stories tall, the sanctuaries, libraries, laboratories, and quarters of the Vilkui surrounded the inner court with their cloisters. A garden of flowers and healing herbs, intricately laid out, filled most of it. A lantern had been lighted in one arcade, but all windows were dark and Ilyandi stood out in the open awaiting her visitor.

She made a slight gesture of dismissal. The acolyte bowed her head and slipped away. Kalava saluted, feeling suddenly awkward but his resolution headlong within him. “Greeting, wise and gracious lady,” he said.

”Well met, brave captain,” the skythinker replied. She gestured at a pair of confronting stone benches. “Shall we be seated?” It fell short of inviting him to share wine, but it meant she would at least hear him out.

They lowered themselves and regarded one another through the swiftly deepening twilight. Ilyandi was a slender woman of perhaps forty years, features thin and regular, eyes large and luminous brown, complexion pale-like smoked copper, he thought. Cropped short in token of celibacy, wavy hair made a bronze coif above a plain white robe. A green spring of tekin, held at her left shoulder by a pin in the emblematic form of interlocked circle and triangle, declared her a Vilku.

”How can I aid your venture?” she asked.

He started in surprise. “Huh! What do you know about my plans?” In haste: “My lady knows much, of course.”

She smiled. “You and your saga have loomed throughout these past decades. And . . . word reaches us here. You search out your former crewmen or bid them come see you, all privately. You order repairs made to the ship remaining in your possession. You meet with chandlers, no doubt to sound them out about prices. Few if any people have noticed. Such discretion is not your wont. Where are you bound, Kalava, and why so secretively?”

His grin was rueful. “My lady’s not just wise and learned, she’s clever. Well, then, why not go straight to the business? I’ve a voyage in mind that most would call crazy. Some among them might try to forestall me, holding that it would anger the gods of those parts- seeing that nobody’s ever returned from there, and recalling old tales of monstrous things glimpsed from afar. I don’t believe them myself, or I wouldn’t try it.”

”Oh, I can imagine you setting forth regardless,” said Ilyandi half under her breath. Louder: “But agreed, the fear is likely false. No one had reached the Shining Fields by sea, either, before you did. You asked for no beforehand spells or blessings then. Why have you sought me now?”

”This is, is different. Not hugging a shoreline. I-well, I’ll need to get and train a new huukin, and that’s no small thing in money or time.” Kalava spread his big hands, almost helplessly. “I had not looked to set forth ever again, you see. Maybe it is madness, an old man with an old crew in a single old ship. I hoped you might counsel me, my lady.”

”You’re scarcely ready for the balefire, when you propose to cross the Windroad Sea,” she answered.

This time he was not altogether taken aback. “May I ask how my lady knows?”

Ilyandi waved a hand. Catching faint lamplight, the long fingers soared through the dusk like nightswoopers. “You have already been east, and would not need to hide such a journey. South, the trade routes are ancient as far as Zhir. What has it to offer but the plunder of tombs and dead cities, brought in by wretched squatters? What lies beyond but unpeopled desolation until, folk say, one would come to the Burning Lands and perish miserably? Westward we know of a few islands, and then empty ocean. If anything lies on the far side, you could starve and thirst to death before you reached it. But northward-yes, wild waters, but sometimes men come upon driftwood of unknown trees or spy storm-borne flyers of unknown breed-and we have all the legends of the High North, and glimpses of mountains from ships blown off course ...” Her voice trailed away.

”Some of those tales ring true to me,” Kalava said. “More true than stories about uncanny sights. Besides, wild huukini breed offshore, where fish are plentiful. I have not seen enough of them there, in season, to account for as many as I’ve seen in open sea. They must have a second shoreline. Where but the High North?”

Ilyandi nodded. “Shrewd, captain. What else do you hope to find?”

He grinned again. “I’ll tell you after I get back, my lady.”

Her tone sharpened. “No treasure-laden cities to plunder.”

He yielded. “Nor to trade with. Would we not have encountered craft of theirs, or, anyhow, wreckage? However . . . the farther north, the less heat and the more rainfall, no? A country yonder could have a mild clime, forestfuls of timber, fat land for plowing, and nobody to fight.” The words throbbed. “No desert creeping in? Room to begin afresh, my lady.”

She regarded him steadily through the gloaming. “You’d come home, recruit people, found a colony, and be its king?”

”Its foremost man, aye, though I expect the kind of folk who’d go will want a republic. But mainly-“ His voice went low. He stared beyond her. “Freedom. Honor. A free-born wife and new sons.

They were silent a while. Full night closed in. It was not as murky as usual, for the clearing in the west had spread rifts up toward the zenith. A breath of coolness soughed in leaves, as if Kalava’s dream whispered a promise.

”You are determined,” she said at last, slowly. “Why have you come to me?”

”For whatever counsel you will give, my lady. Facts about the passage may be hoarded in books here.”

She shook her head. “I doubt it. Unless navigation-yes, that is .1 real barrier, is it not?”

”Always,” he sighed.

”What means of wayfinding have you?”

”Why, you must know.”

”I know what is the common knowledge about it. Craftsmen keep their trade secrets, and surely skippers are no different in that regard. If you will tell me how you navigate, it shall not pass these -lips, and I may be able to add something.”

Eagerness took hold of him. “I’ll wager my lady can! We see moon or stars unoften and fitfully. Most days the sun shows no i more than a blur of dull light amongst the clouds, if that. But you, skythinkers like you, they’ve watched and measured for hundreds of years, they’ve gathered lore-“ Kalava paused. “Is it too sacred to share?”

”No, no,” she replied. “The Vilkui keep the calendar for everyone, do they not? The reason that sailors rarely get our help is that they could make little or no use of our learning. Speak.”

”True, it was Vilkui who discovered lodestones . . . . Well, coasting these waters, I rely mainly on my remembrance of landmarks, or a periplus if they’re less familiar to me. Soundings help, especially if the plumb brings up a sample of the bottom for me to look at and taste. Then in the Shining Fields I got a crystal-you must know about it, for I gave another to the order when I got back-I look through it at the sky and, if the weather be not too thick, I see more closely where the sun is than I can with a bare eye. A logline and hourglass give some idea of speed, a lodestone some idea of direction, when out of sight of land. Sailing for the High North and return, I’d mainly use it, I suppose. But if my lady could tell me of anything else-“

She sat forward on her bench. He heard a certain intensity.

”I think I might, captain. I’ve studied that sunstone of yours. With it, one can estimate latitude and time of day, if one knows the date and the sun’s heavenly course during the year. Likewise, even glimpses of moon and stars would be valuable to a traveler who knew them well.”

”That’s not me,” he said wryly. “Could my lady write something down? Maybe this old head won’t be too heavy to puzzle it out.”

She did not seem to hear. Her gaze had gone upward. “The aspect of the stars in the High North,” she murmured. “It could tell us whether the world is indeed round. And are our vague auroral shimmers more bright yonder-in the veritable Lodeland-?”

His look followed hers. Three stars twinkled wan where the clouds were torn. “It’s good of you, my lady,” he said, “that you sit talking with me, when you could be at your quadrant or whatever, snatching this chance.”

Her eyes met his. “Yours may be a better chance, captain,” she answered fiercely. “When first I got the rumor of your expedition, I began to think upon it and what it could mean. Yes, I will help you where I can. I may even sail with you.”

2

The Gray Courser departed Sirsu on a morning tide as early as there was light to steer by. Just the same, people crowded the dock. The majority watched mute. A number made signs against evil. A few, mostly young, sang a defiant paean, but the air seemed to muffle their strains.

Only lately had Kalava given out what his goal was. He must, to account for the skythinker’s presence, which could not be kept hidden. That sanctification left the authorities no excuse to forbid his venture. However, it took little doubt and fear off those who believed the outer Windroad a haunt of monsters and demons, which might be stirred to plague home waters.

His crew shrugged the notion off, or laughed at it. At any rate, they said they did. Two-thirds of them were crusty shellbacks who had fared under his command before. For the rest, he had had to take what he could scrape together, impoverished laborers and masterless ruffians. All were, though, very respectful of the Vilku.

Gray Courser was a yalka, broad-beamed and shallow-bottomed, with a low forecastle and poop and a deckhouse amidships. The foremast carried two square sails, the mainmast one square and on< fore-and-aft; a short bowsprit extended for a jib. A catapult was mounted in the bows. On either side, two boats hung from davits, aft of the harnessing shafts. Her hull was painted according to her name, with red trim. Alongside swam the huukin, its back a sleek blue ridge.

Kalava had the tiller until she cleared the river mouth and stood out into the Gulf. By then it was full day. A hot wind whipped gray-green water into whitecaps that set the vessel rolling. It whined in the shrouds; timbers creaked. He turned the helm over to a sailor, trod forward on the poop deck, and sounded a trumpet. Men stared. From her cabin below, Ilyandi climbed up to stand beside him. Her white robe fluttered like wings that would fain be asoar. She raised her arms and chanted a spell for the voyage:

”Burning, turning,

The sun-wheel reels

Behind the Mindness

Cloud-smoke evokes.

The old cold moon

Seldom tells

Where it lairs

With stars afar.

No men’s omens

Abide to guide

High in the skies.

But lodestone for Lodeland

Strongly longs.”

While the deckhands hardly knew what she meant, they felt heartened.

Land dwindled aft, became a thin blue line, vanished into waves and mists. Kalava was cutting straight northwest across the Gulf. He meant to sail through the night, and thus wanted plenty of sea room. Also, he and Ilyandi would practice with her ideas about navigation. Hence after a while the mariners spied no other sails, and the loneliness began to weigh on them.

However, they worked stoutly enough. Some thought it a good sign, and cheered, when the clouds clove toward evening and they saw a horned moon. Their mates were frightened; was the moon supposed to appear by day? Kalava bullied them out of it.

Wind stiffened during the dark. By morning it had raised seas in which the ship reeled. It was a westerly, too, forcing her toward land no matter how close-hauled. When he spied, through scud, the crags of Cape Vairka, the skipper realized he could not round it unaided.

He was a rough man, but he had been raised in those skills that were seemly for a freeman of Clan Samayoki. Though not a poet, lie could make an acceptable verse when occasion demanded. He stood in the forepeak and shouted into the storm, the words flung back to his men:

”Northward now veering,

Steering/row kin-rift,

Spindrift flung gale-home,

Sail-borne is daft.

Craft will soon flounder,

Founder, go under-

Thunder this wit-lack!

Sit hack and call

All that swim near.

Steer then to northward.”

Having thus offered the gods a making, he put the horn to his mouth and blasted forth a summons to his huukin.

The great beast heard and slipped close. Kalava took the lead in lowering the shafts. A line around his waist for safety, he sprang over the rail, down onto the broad back. He kept his feet, though the two men who followed him went off into the billows and must be hauled up. Together they rode the huukin, guiding it between the poles where they could attach the harness.

”I waited too long,” Kalava admitted. “This would have been easier yesterday. Well, something for you to brag about in the inns at home, nay?” Their mates drew them back aboard. Meanwhile the sails had been furled. Kalava took first watch at the reins. Mightily pulled the huukin, tail and flippers churning foam that the wind snatched away, on into the open, unknown sea.

III

Wayfarer woke.

He had passed the decades of transit shut down. A being such as Alpha would have spent them conscious, its mind perhaps at work on an intellectual or artistic creation-to it, no basic distinction-or perhaps replaying an existent piece for contemplation-enjoyment or perhaps in activity too abstract for words to hint at. Wayfarer’s capabilities, though large, were insufficient for that. The hardware and software (again we use myth) of his embodiment were designed principally for interaction with the material universe. In effect, there was nothing for him to do.

He could not even engage in discourse. The robotic systems of the ship were subtle and powerful but lacked true consciousness; it was unnecessary for them, and distraction or boredom might have posed a hazard. Nor could he converse with entities elsewhere; signals would have taken too long going to and fro. He did spend a while, whole minutes of external time, reliving the life of his Christian Brannock element, studying the personality, accustoming himself to its ways. Thereafter he ... went to sleep.

The ship reactivated him as it crossed what remained of the Oort Cloud. Instantly aware, he coupled to instrument after instrument and scanned the Solar System. Although his database summarized Gaia’s reports, he deemed it wise to observe for himself. The eagerness, the bittersweet sense of homecoming, that flickered around his calm logic were Christian Brannock’s. Imagine long-forgotten feelings coming astir in you when you return to a scene of your early childhood.

Naturally, the ghost in the machine knew that changes had been enormous since his mortal eyes closed forever. The rings of Saturn were tattered and tenuous. Jupiter had gained a showy set of them from the death of a satellite, but its Red Spot faded away ages ago. Mars was moonless, its axis steeply canted. . . . Higher resolution would have shown scant traces of humanity. From the antimatter plants inside the orbit of Mercury to the comet harvesters beyond Pluto, what was no more needed had been dismantled or left forsaken. Wind, water, chemistry, tectonics, cosmic stones, spalling radiation, nuclear decay, quantum shifts had patiently reclaimed the relics for chaos. Some fossils existed yet, and some eroded fragments aboveground or in space, otherwise all was only in Gaia’s memory.

No matter. It was toward his old home that the Christian Bran-nock facet of Wayfarer sped.

Unaided, he would not have seen much difference from aforetime in the sun. It was slightly larger and noticeably brighter. Human vision would have perceived the light as more white, with the faintest bluish quality. Unprotected skin would have reacted quickly to the increased ultraviolet. The solar wind was stronger, too. But thus far the changes were comparatively minor. This star was still on the main sequence. Planets with greenhouse atmospheres were most affected. Certain minerals on Venus were now molten. Earth-

The ship hurtled inward, reached its goal, and danced into parking orbit. At close range, Wayfarer looked forth.

On Luna, the patterns of maria were not quite the same, mountains were further worn down, and newer craters had wrecked or obliterated older ones. Rubble-filled anomalies showed where ground had collapsed on deserted cities. Essentially, though, the moon was again the same desolation, seared by day and death-cold by night, as before life’s presence. It had receded farther, astronomically no big distance, and this had lengthened Earth’s rotation period by about an hour. However, as yet it circled near enough to stabilize that spin.

The mother planet offered less to our imaginary eyes. Clouds wrapped it in dazzling white. Watching carefully, you could have seen swirls and bandings, but to a quick glance the cover was well nigh featureless. Shifting breaks in it gave blue flashes of water, brown flashes of land-nowhere ice or snowfall, nowhere lights after dark; and the radio spectrum seethed voiceless.

When did the last human foot tread this world? Wayfarer searched his database. The information was not there. Perhaps it was unrecorded, unknown. Perhaps that last flesh had chanced to die alone or chosen to die privately.

Certainly it was long and long ago. How brief had been the span of Homo sapiens, from flint and fire to machine intelligence! Not that the end had come suddenly or simply. It took millennia, said the database: time for whole civilizations to rise and fall and leave their mutant descendants. Sometimes population decline had reversed in this or that locality, sometimes nations heeded the vatic utterances of prophets and strove to turn history backward-for a while, a while. But always the trend was ineluctable.

The clustered memories of Christian Brannock gave rise to a thought in Wayfarer that was as if the man spoke: I saw the beginning. I did not foresee the end. To me this was the magnificent dawn of hope.

And was I wrong?

The organic individual is mortal. It can find no way to stave off eventual disintegration; quantum chemistry forbids. Besides, if a man could live for a mere thousand years, the data storage capacity of his brain would be saturated, incapable of holding more. Well before then, he would have been overwhelmed by the geometric increase of correlations, made feeble-minded or insane. Nor could he survive the rigors of star travel at any reasonable speed or unearthly environments, in a universe never meant for him.

But transferred into a suitable inorganic structure, the pattern of neuron and molecular traces and their relationships that is his inner self becomes potentially immortal. The very complexity that allows this makes him continue feeling as well as thinking. If the quality of emotions is changed, it is because his physical organism has become stronger, more sensitive, more intelligent and aware. He will soon lose any wistfulness about his former existence. His new life gives him so much more, a cosmos of sensing and experience, memory and thought, space and time. He can multiply himself, merge and unmerge with others, grow in spirit until he reaches a limit once inconceivable; and after that he can become a part of a mind greater still, and thus grow onward.

The wonder was, Christian Brannock mused, that any humans whatsoever had held out, clung to the primitive, refused to see that their heritage was no longer of DNA but of psyche.

And yet-

The half-formed question faded away. His half-formed person-hood rejoined Wayfarer. Gaia was calling from Earth.

She had, of course, received notification, which arrived several years in advance of the spacecraft. Her manifold instruments, on the planet and out between planets, had detected the approach. For the message she now sent, she chose to employ a modulated neutrino beam. Imagine her saying: “Welcome. Do you need help? I am ready to give any I can.” Imagine this in a voice low and warm.

Imagine Wayfarer replying, “Thank you, but all’s well. I’ll be down directly, if that suits you.”

”I do not quite understand why you have come. Has the rapport with me not been adequate?”

No, Wayfarer refrained from saying. “I will explain later in more detail than the transmission could carry. Essentially, though, the reason is what you were told. We”-he de-emphasized rather than excluded her-“wonder if Earth ought to be saved from solar expansion.”

Her tone cooled a bit. “I have said more than once: No. You can perfect your engineering techniques anywhere else. The situation here is unique. The knowledge to be won by observing the unhampered course of events is unpredictable, but it will be enormous, and I have good cause to believe it will prove of the highest value.”

”That may well be. I’ll willingly hear you out, if you care to unfold your thoughts more fully than you have hitherto. But I do want to make my own survey and develop my own recommendations. No reflection on you; we both realize that no one mind can encompass every possibility, every interpretation. Nor can any one mind follow out every ongoing factor in what it observes; and what is overlooked can prove to be the agent of chaotic change. I may notice something that escaped you. Unlikely, granted. After your millions of years here, you very nearly are Earth and the life on it, are you not? But ... we ... would like an independent opinion.”

Imagine her laughing. “At least you are polite, Wayfarer. Yes, do come down. I will steer you in.”

”That won’t be necessary. Your physical centrum is in the Arctic region, isn’t it? I can find my way.”

He sensed steel beneath the mildness: “Best I guide you. You recognize the situation as inherently chaotic. Descending on an arbitrary path, you might seriously perturb certain things in which I am interested. Please.”

”As you wish,” Wayfarer conceded.

Robotics took over. The payload module of the spacecraft detached from the drive module, which stayed in orbit. Under its own power but controlled from below, asheen in the harsh spatial sunlight, the cylindroid braked and bore downward.

It pierced the cloud deck. Wayfarer scanned eagerly. However, this was no sightseeing tour. The descent path sacrificed efficiency and made almost straight for a high northern latitude. Sonic-boom thunder trailed.

He did spy the fringe of a large continent oriented east and west, and saw that those parts were mainly green. Beyond lay a stretch of sea. He thought that he glimpsed something peculiar on it, but passed over too fast, with his attention directed too much ahead, to be sure.

The circumpolar land mass hove in view. Wayfarer compared maps that Gaia had transmitted. They were like nothing that Christian Brannock remembered. Plate tectonics had slowed, as radioactivity and original heat in the core of Earth declined, but drift, subduction, upthrust still went on.

He cared more about the life here. Epoch after epoch, Gaia had described its posthuman evolution as she watched. Following the mass extinction of the Paleotechnic, it had regained the abundance and diversity of a Cretaceous or a Tertiary. Everything was different, though, except for a few small survivals. To Wayfarer, as to Alpha and, ultimately, the galactic brain, those accounts seemed somehow, increasingly, incomplete. They did not quite make ecological sense-as of the past hundred thousand years or so. Nor did all of Gaia’s responses to questions.

Perhaps she was failing to gather full data, perhaps she was misinterpreting, perhaps-It was another reason to send him to her.

Arctica appeared below the flyer. Imagine her giving names to it and its features. As long as she had lived with them, they had their identities for her. The Coast Range of hills lifted close behind the littoral. Through it cut the Remnant River, which had been greater when rains were more frequent but continued impressive. With its tributaries it drained the intensely verdant Bountiful Valley. On the far side of that, foothills edged the steeply rising Boreal Mountains. Once the highest among them had been snowcapped, now their peaks were naked rock. Streams rushed down the flanks, most of them somewhere joining the Remnant as it flowed through its gorges toward the sea. In a lofty vale gleamed the Rainbowl, the big lake that was its headwaters. Overlooking from the north loomed the mountain Mindhome, its top, the physical centrum of Gaia, lost in cloud cover.

In a way the scenes were familiar to him. She had sent plenty of full-sensory transmissions, as part of her contribution to universal knowledge and thought. Wayfarer could even recall the geological past, back beyond the epoch when Arctica broke free and drifted north, ramming into land already present and thrusting the Boreals heavenward. He could extrapolate the geological future in comparable detail, until a red giant filling half the sky glared down on an airless globe of stone and sand, which would at last melt. Nevertheless, the reality, the physical being here, smote him more strongly than he had expected. His sensors strained to draw in every datum while his vessel flew needlessly fast to the goal.

He neared the mountain. Jutting south from the range, it was not the tallest. Brushy forest grew all the way up its sides, lush on the lower slopes, parched on the heights, where many trees were leafless skeletons. That was due a recent climatic shift, lowering the mean level of clouds, so that a formerly well-watered zone had been suffering a decades-long drought. (Yes, Earth was moving faster toward its doomsday.) Fire must be a constant threat, he thought. But no, Gala’s agents could quickly put any out, or she might simply ignore it. Though not large, the area she occupied on the summit was paved over and doubtless nothing was vulnerable to heat or smoke.

He landed. For an instant of planetary time, lengthy for minds that worked at close to light speed, there was communication silence.

He was again above the cloud deck. It eddied white, the peak rising from it like an island among others, into the level rays of sunset. Overhead arched a violet clarity. A thin wind whittered, cold at this altitude. On a level circle of blue-black surfacing, about a kilometer wide, stood the crowded structures and engines of the centrum.

A human would have seen an opalescent dome surrounded by towers, some sheer as lances, some intricately lacy; and silver spiderwebs; and lesser things of varied but curiously simple shapes, mobile units waiting to be dispatched on their tasks. Here and there, flyers darted and hovered, most of them as small and exquisite as hummingbirds (if our human had known hummingbirds). To her the scene would have wavered slightly, as if she saw it through rippling water, or it throbbed with quiet energies, or it pulsed in and out of space-time. She would not have sensed the complex of force fields and quantum-mechanical waves, nor the microscopic and submicroscopic entities that were the major part of it.

Wayfarer perceived otherwise.

Then: “Again, welcome,” Gaia said.

”And again, thank you,” Wayfarer replied. “I am glad to be here.”

They regarded one another, not as bodies-which neither was wearing-but as minds, matrices of memory, individuality, and awareness. Separately he wondered what she thought of him. She was giving him no more of herself than had always gone over the communication lines between the stars. That was; a nodal organism, like Alpha and millions of others, which over the eons had increased its capabilities, while ceaselessly experiencing and thinking; the ages of interaction with Earth and the life on Earth, maybe shaping her soul more deeply than the existence she shared with her own kind; traces of ancient human uploads, but they were not like Christian Brannock, copies of them dispersed across the galaxy, no, these had chosen to stay with the mother world . . . .

”I told you I am glad too,” said Gaia regretfully, “but I am not, quite. You question my stewardship.”

”Not really,” Wayfarer protested. “I hope not ever. We simply wish to know better how you carry it out.”

”Why, you do know. As with any of us who is established on a planet, high among my activities is to study its complexities, follow its evolution. On this planet that means, above all, the evolution of its life, everything from genetics to ecology. In what way have I failed to share information with my fellows?”

In many ways, Wayfarer left unspoken. Overtly; “Once we”-here he referred to the galactic brain-“give close consideration to the matter, we found countless unresolved puzzles. For example-“

What he set forth was hundreds of examples, ranging over millennia. Let a single case serve. About ten thousand years ago, the big continent south of Arctica had supported a wealth of large grazing animals. Their herds darkened the plains and made loud the woods. Gaia had described them in loving detail, from the lyre-curved horns of one genus to the wind-rustled manes of another. Abruptly, in terms of historical time, she transmitted no more about them. When asked why, she said they had gone extinct. She never explained how.

To Wayfarer she responded in such haste that he got a distinct impression she realized she had made a mistake. (Remember, this is a myth.) “A variety of causes. Climates became severe as temperatures rose-“

”I am sorry,” he demurred, “but when analyzed, the meteorological data you supplied show that warming and desiccation cannot yet have been that significant in those particular regions.”

”How are you so sure?” she retorted. Imagine her angry. “Have any of you lived with Earth for megayears, to know it that well?” Her tone hardened. “I do not myself pretend to full knowledge. A living world is too complex-chaotic. Cannot you appreciate that? I am still seeking comprehension of too many phenomena. In this instance, consider just a small shift in ambient conditions, coupled with new diseases and scores of other factors, most of them subtle. I believe that, combined, they broke a balance of nature. But unless and until I learn more, I will not waste bandwidth in talk about it.”

”I sympathize with that,” said Wayfarer mildly, hoping for conciliation. “Maybe I can discover or suggest something helpful.”

”No. You are too ignorant, you are blind, you can only do harm.”

He stiffened. “We shall see.” Anew he tried for peace. “I did not come in any hostility. I came because here is the fountainhead of us all, and we think of saving it.”

Her manner calmed likewise. “How would you?”

”That is one thing I have come to find out-what the best way is, should we proceed.”

In the beginning, maybe, a screen of planetary dimensions, kept between Earth and sun by an interplay of gravity and electromagnetism, to ward off the fraction of energy that was not wanted. It would only be a temporary expedient, though, possibly not worthwhile. That depended on how long it would take to accomplish the real work. Engines in close orbit around the star, drawing their power from its radiation, might generate currents in its body that carried fresh hydrogen down to the core, thus restoring the nuclear furnace to its olden state. Or they might bleed gas off into space, reducing the mass of the sun, damping its fires but adding billions upon billions of years wherein it scarcely changed any more. That would cause the planets to move outward, a factor that must be taken into account but would reduce the requirements.

Whatever was done, the resources of several stars would be needed to accomplish it, for time had grown cosmically short.

”An enormous work,” Gaia said. Wayfarer wondered if she had in mind the dramatics of it, apparitions in heaven, such as centuries during which fire-fountains rushed visibly out of the solar disc.

”For an enormous glory,” he declared.

”No,” she answered curtly. “For nothing, and worse than nothing. Destruction of everything I have lived for. Eternal loss to the heritage.”

”Why, is not Earth the heritage?”

”No. Knowledge is. I tried to make that clear to Alpha.” She paused. “To you I say again, the evolution of life, its adaptations, struggles, transformations, and how at last it meets death-those are unforeseeable, and nowhere else in the space-time universe can there be a world like this for them to play themselves out. They will enlighten us in ways the galactic brain itself cannot yet conceive. They may well open to us whole new phases of ultimate reality.”

”Why would not a life that went on for gigayears do so, and more?”

”Because here I, the observer of the ages, have gained some knowledge of this destiny, some oneness with it-“ She sighed. “Oh, you do not understand. You refuse to.”

”On the contrary,” Wayfarer said, as softly as might be, “I hope to. Among the reasons I came is that we can communicate being to being, perhaps more fully than across light-years and certainly more quickly.”

She was silent a while. When she spoke again, her tone had gone gentle. “More . . . intimately. Yes. Forgive my resentment. It was wrong of me. I will indeed do what I can to make you welcome and help you learn.”

”Thank you, thank you,” Wayfarer said happily. “And I will do what I can toward that end.”

The sun went under the cloud deck. A crescent moon stood aloft. The wind blew a little stronger, a little chillier.

”But if we decide against saving Earth,” Wayfarer asked, “if it is to go molten and formless, every trace of its history dissolved, will you not mourn?”

”The record I have guarded will stay safe,” Gaia replied.

He grasped her meaning: the database of everything known about this world. It was here in her. Much was also stored elsewhere, but she held the entirety. As the sun became a devouring monster, she would remove her physical plant to the outer reaches of the system.

”But you have done more than passively preserve it, have you not?” he said.

”Yes, of course.” How could an intelligence like hers have refrained? “I have considered the data, worked with them, evaluated them, tried to reconstruct the conditions that brought them about.”

And in the past thousands of years she has become ever more taciturn about that, too, or downright evasive, he thought.

”You had immense gaps to fill in,” he hinted.

”Inevitably. The past, also, is quantum probabilistic. By what roads, what means, did history come to us?”

”Therefore you create various emulations, to see what they lead to,” about which she had told scarcely anything.

“You knew that. I admit, since you force me, that besides trying to find what happened, I make worlds to show what might have happened.”

He was briefly startled. He had not been deliberately trying to bring out any such confession. Then he realized that she had foreseen he was bound to catch scent of it, once they joined their minds in earnest.

”Why?” he asked.

”Why else but for a more complete understanding?”

In his inwardness, Wayfarer reflected: Yes, she had been here since the time of humanity. The embryo of her existed before Christian Brannock was born. Into the growing fullness of her had gone the mind-patterns of humans who chose not to go to the stars but to abide on old Earth. And the years went by in their tens of millions.

Naturally she was fascinated by the past. She must do most of her living in it. Could that be why she was indifferent to the near future, or actually wanted catastrophe?

Somehow that thought did not feel right to him. Gaia was a mystery he must solve.

Cautiously, he ventured, “Then you act as a physicist might, tracing hypothetical configurations of the wave function through space-time-except that the subjects of your experiments are conscious.”

”I do no wrong,” she said. “Come with me into any of those worlds and see.”

”Gladly,” he agreed, unsure whether he lied. He mustered resolution. “Just the same, duty demands I conduct my own survey of the material environment.”

”As you will. Let me help you prepare.” She was quiet for a span. In this thin air, a human would have seen the first stars blink into the sight. “But I believe it will be by sharing the history of my stewardship that we truly come to know one another.”

IV

Storm-battered until men must work the pumps without cease, the Gray Courser limped eastward along the southern coast of an unknown land. Wind set that direction, for the huukin trailed after, so worn and starved that what remained of its strength must be reserved for sorest need. The shore rolled jewel-green, save where woods dappled it darker, toward a wall of gentle hills. All was thick with life, grazing herds, wings multitudinous overhead, but no voyager had set foot there. Surf dashed in such violence that Kalava was not certain a boat could live through it. Meanwhile they had caught but little rainwater, and what was in the butts had gotten low and foul.

He stood in the bows, peering ahead, Ilyandi at his side. Wind boomed and shrilled, colder than they were used to. Wrack flew beneath an overcast gone heavy. Waves ran high, gray-green, white-maned, foam blown off them in streaks. The ship rolled, pitched, and groaned.

Yet they had seen the sky uncommonly often. Ilyandi believed that clouds-doubtless vapors sucked from the ground by heat, turning back to water as they rose, like steam from a kettle-formed less readily in this clime. Too eagerly at her instruments and reckonings to speak much, she had now at last given her news to the captain.

”Then you think you know where we are?” he asked hoarsely.

Her face, gaunt within the cowl of a sea-stained cloak, bore the least smile. “No. This country is as nameless to me as to you. But, yes, I do think I can say we are no more than fifty daymarches from Ulonai, and it may be as little as forty.”

Kalava’s fist smote the rail. “By Ruvio’s ax! How I hoped for this!” The words tumbled from him. “It means the weather tossed us mainly back and forth between the two shorelines. We’ve not come unreturnably far. Every ship henceforward can have a better passage. See you, she can first go out to the Ending Islands and wait at ease for favoring winds. The skipper will know he’ll make landfall. We’ll have it worked out after a few more voyages, just what lodestone bearing will bring him to what place hereabouts.”

”But anchorage?” she wondered.

He laughed, which he had not done for many days and nights. “As for that-“

A cry from the lookout at the masthead broke through. Down the length of the vessel men raised their eyes. Terror howled.

Afterward no two tongues bore the same tale. One said that a firebolt had pierced the upper clouds, trailing thunder. Another told of a sword as long as the hull, and blood carried on the gale of its flight. To a third it was a beast with jaws agape and three tails aflame . . . . Kalava remembered a spear among whirling rainbows. I o him Ilyandi said, when they were briefly alone, that she thought of a shuttle now seen, now unseen as it wove a web on which stood writing she could not read. All witnesses agreed that it came from over the sea, sped on inland through heaven, and vanished behind the hills.

Men went mad. Some ran about screaming. Some wailed to their gods. Some cast themselves down on the deck and shivered, or drew into balls and squeezed their eyes shut. No hand at helm or pumps, the ship wallowed about, sails banging, adrift toward the surf, while water drained in through sprung seams and lapped higher in the bilge.

”Avast!” roared Kalava. He sprang down the foredeck ladder and went among the crew. “Be you men? Up on your feet or die!” With kicks and cuffs he drove them back to their duties. One yelled and drew a knife on him. He knocked the fellow senseless. Barely in time, Gray Courser came again under control. She was then too near shore to get the huukin harnessed. Kalava took the helm, wore ship, and clawed back to sea room.

Mutiny was all too likely, once the sailors regained a little courage. When Kalava could yield place to a halfway competent steersman, he sought Ilyandi and they talked a while in her cabin. Thereafter they returned to the foredeck and he shouted for attention, Standing side by side, they looked down on the faces, frightened or terrified or sullen, of the men who had no immediate tasks.

”Hear this,” Kalava said into the wind. “Pass it on to the rest. I know you’d turn south this day if you had your wish. But you can’t. We’d never make the crossing, the shape we’re in. Which would f you liefer have, the chance of wealth and fame or the certainty of  drowning? We’ve got to make repairs, we’ve got to restock, and then we can sail home, bringing wondrous news. When can we fix things up? Soon, I tell you, soon. I’ve been looking at the water. Look for yourselves. See how it’s taking on more and more of a brown shade, and how bits of plant stuff float about on the waves. That means a river, a big river, emptying out somewhere nigh. And that means a harbor for us. As for the sight we saw, here’s the Vilku, our lady Ilyandi, to speak about it.”

The skythinker stepped forward. She had changed into a clean white robe with the emblems of her calling, and held a staff topped by a sigil. Though her voice was low, it carried.

”Yes, that was a fearsome sight. It lends truth to the old stories of things that appeared to mariners who ventured, or were blown, far north. But think. Those sailors did win home again. Those who did not must have perished of natural causes. For why would the gods or the demons sink some and not others?

”What we ourselves saw merely flashed overhead. Was it warning us off? No, because if it knew that much about us, it knew we cannot immediately turn back. Did it give us any heed at all? Quite possibly not. It was very strange, yes, but that does not mean it was any threat. The world is full of strangenesses. I could tell you of things seen on clear nights over the centuries, fiery streaks down the sky or stars with glowing tails. We of the Vilkui do not understand them, but neither do we fear them. We give them their due honor and respect, as signs from the gods.”

She paused before finishing: “Moreover, in the secret annals of our order lie accounts of visions and wonders exceeding these. All folk know that from time to time the gods have given their word to certain holy men or women, for the guidance of the people. I may not tell how they manifest themselves, but I will say that this today was not wholly unlike.

”Let us therefore believe that the sign granted us is a good one.” She went on to a protective chant-spell and an invocation of the Powers. That heartened most of her listeners. They were, after all, in considerable awe of her. Besides, the larger part of them had sailed with Kalava before and done well out of it. They bullied the rest into obedience.

”Dismissed,” said the captain. “Come evening, you’ll get a ration of liquor.”

A weak cheer answered him. The ship fared onward. Next morning they did indeed find a broad, sheltered bay, dun with silt. Hitching up the huukin, they went cautiously in until they spied the river foretold by Kalava. Accompanied by a few bold men, he took a boat ashore. Marshes, meadows, and woods all had signs of abundant game. Various plants were unfamiliar, but he recognized others, among them edible fruits and bulbs. “It is well,” he said. “This land is ripe for our taking.” No lightning bolt struck him down.

Having located a suitable spot, he rowed back to the ship, brought her in on the tide, and beached her. He could see that the water often rose higher yet, so he would be able to float her off again when she was ready. That would take time, but he felt no haste. Let his folk make proper camp, he thought, get rested and nourished, before they began work. Hooks, nets, and weirs would give rich catches. Several of the crew had hunting skills as well. He did himself.

His gaze roved upstream, toward the hills. Yes, presently he would lead a detachment to learn what lay beyond.

V

Gaia had never concealed her reconstructive research into human history. It was perhaps her finest achievement. But slowly those of her fellows in the galactic brain who paid close attention had come to feel that it was obsessing her. And then of late-within the past hundred thousand years or so-they were finding her reports increasingly scantier, less informative, at last ambiguous to the point of evasiveness. They did not press her about it; the patience of the universe was theirs. Nevertheless they had grown concerned. Especially had Alpha, who as the nearest was in the closest, most frequent contact; and therefore, now, had Wayfarer. Gaia’s activities and attitudes were a primary factor in the destiny of Earth. Without a better understanding of her, the rightness of saving the planet was undecidable.

Surely an important part of her psyche was the history and archeology she preserved, everything from the animal origins to the machine fulfillment of genus Homo. Unnumbered individual minds had uploaded into her, too, had become elements of her being-far more than were in any other node. What had she made of all this over the megayears, and what had it made of her?

She could not well refuse Wayfarer admittance; the heritage belonged to her entire fellowship, ultimately to intelligence throughout the cosmos of the future. Guided by her, he would go through the database of her observations and activities in external reality, geological, biological, astronomical.

As for the other reality, interior to her, the work she did with her records and emulations of humankind-to evaluate that, some purely human interaction seemed called for. Hence Wayfarer’s makeup included the mind-pattern of a man.

Christian Brannock’s had been chosen out of those whose uploads went starfaring because he was among the earliest, less molded than most by relationships with machines. Vigor, intelligence, and adaptability were other desired characteristics.

His personality was itself a construct, a painstaking refabrication by Alpha, who had taken strands (components, overtones) of his own mind and integrated them to form a consciousness that became an aspect of Wayfarer. No doubt it was not a perfect duplicate of the original. Certainly, while it had all the memories of Christian Brannock’s lifetime, its outlook was that of a young man, not an old one. In addition, it possessed some knowledge-the barest sketch, grossly oversimplified so as not to overload it-of what had happened since its body died. Deep underneath its awareness lay the longing to return to an existence more full than it could now imagine. Yet, knowing that it would be taken back into the oneness when its task was done, it did not mourn any loss. Rather, to the extent that it was differentiated from Wayfarer, it took pleasure in sensations, thoughts, and emotions that it had effectively forgotten.

When the differentiation had been completed, the experience ol being human again became well-nigh everything for it, and gladsome, because so had the man gone through life.

To describe how this was done, we must again resort to myth and say that Wayfarer downloaded the Christian Brannock subroutine into the main computer of the system that was Gaia. To describe what actually occurred would require the mathematics ol wave mechanics and an entire concept of multi-leveled, mutably dimensioned reality that it had taken minds much greater than humankind’s a long time to work out,

We can, however, try to make clear that what took place in the system was not a mere simulation. It was an emulation. Its events were not of a piece with events among the molecules of flesh and blood; but they were, in their way, just as real. The persons created had wills as free as any mortal’s, and whatever dangers they met could do harm equal to anything a mortal body might suffer.

Consider a number of people at a given moment. Each is doin^ something, be it only thinking, remembering, or sleeping-together with all ongoing physiological and biochemical processes. They arc interacting with each other and with their surroundings, too; and every element of these surroundings, be it only a stone or a leaf or a photon of sunlight, is equally involved. The complexity seems beyond conception, let alone enumeration or calculation. But consider further: At this one instant, every part of the whole, however minute, is in one specific state; and thus the whole itself is. Electrons are all in their particular quantum shells, atoms are all in their particular compounds and configurations, energy fields all have their particular values at each particular point-Suppose an infinitely fine-grained photograph.

A moment later, the state is different. However slightly, fields have pulsed, atoms have shifted about, electrons have jumped, bodies have moved. But this new state derives from the first according lo natural laws. And likewise for every succeeding state.

In crude, mythic language: Represent each variable of one state by some set of numbers; or, to put it in equivalent words, map the state into an n-dimensional phase space. Input the laws of nature. Run the program. The computer model should then evolve from state to state in exact correspondence with the evolution of our original matter-energy world. That includes life and consciousness. The maps of organisms go through one-to-one analogues of everything that the organisms themselves would, among these being the processes of sensation and thought. To them, they and their world are the same as in the original. The question of which set is the more real is meaningless.

Of course, this primitive account is false. The program did not exactly follow the course of events “outside.” Gaia lacked both the data and the capability necessary to model the entire universe, or even the entire Earth. Likewise did any other node, and the galactic brain. Powers of that order lay immensely far in the future, if they would ever be realized. What Gaia could accommodate was so much less that the difference in degree amounted to a difference in kind.

For example, if events on the surface of a planet were to be played out, the stars must be lights in the night sky and nothing else, every other effect neglected. Only a limited locality on the globe could be done in anything like full detail; the rest grew more and more incomplete as distance from the scene increased, until at the antipodes there was little more than simplified geography, hydrography, and atmospherics. Hence weather on the scene would very soon be quite unlike weather at the corresponding moment of the original. This is the simplest, most obvious consequence of the limitations. The totality is beyond reckoning-and we have not even mentioned relativistic nonsimultaneity.

Besides, atom-by-atom modeling was a practical impossibility; statistical mechanics and approximations must substitute. Chaos and quantum uncertainties made developments incalculable in principle. Other, more profound considerations entered as well, but with them language fails utterly.

Let it be said, as a myth, that such creations made their destinies for themselves.

And yet, what a magnificent instrumentality the creator system was! Out of nothingness, it could bring worlds into being, evolutions, lives, ecologies, awarenesses, histories, entire timelines. They need not be fragmentary miscopies of something “real,” dragging out their crippled spans until the nodal intelligence took pity and canceled them. Indeed, they need not derive in any way from the “outside.” They could be works of imagination-fairy-tale worlds, perhaps, where benevolent gods ruled and magic ran free. Always, the logic of their boundary conditions caused them to develop appropriately, to be at home in their existences.

The creator system was the mightiest device ever made for the pursuit of art, science, philosophy, and understanding.

So it came about that Christian Brannock found himself alive again, young again, in the world that Gaia and Wayfarer had chosen for his new beginning.

2

He stood in a garden on a day of bright sun and mild, fragrant breezes. It was a formal garden, graveled paths, low-clipped hedges, roses and lilies in geometric beds, around a lichened stone basin where goldfish swam. Brick walls, ivy-heavy, enclosed three sides, a wrought-iron gate in them leading to a lawn. On the fourth side lay ii house, white, slate-roofed, classically proportioned, a style that to him was antique. Honeybees buzzed. From a yew tree overlooking the wall came the twitter of birds.

A woman walked toward him. Her flower-patterned gown, the voluminous skirt and sleeves, a cameo hung on her bosom above the low neckline, dainty shoes, parasol less an accessory than a completion, made his twenty-third-century singlesuit feel abruptly barbaric. She was tall and well formed. Despite the garments, her Unit was lithe. As she neared, he saw clear features beneath high-piled mahogany hair.

She reached him, stopped, and met his gaze. “Benveni, Capita Brannock,” she greeted. Her voice was low and musical.

”Uh, g’day, Sorita-uh-“ he fumbled.

She blushed. “I beg your pardon, Captain Brannock. I forgot and used my Inglay-English of my time. I’ve been”-she hesitated- “supplied with yours, and we both have been with the contemporary language.”

A sense of dream was upon him. To speak as dryly as he could was like clutching at something solid. “You’re from my future, then?”

She nodded. “I was born about two hundred years after you.”

”That means after my death, right?” He saw an inward shadow pass over her face. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She turned entirely calm, even smiled a bit. “It’s all right. We both know what we are, and what we used to be.”

”But-“

”Yes, but.” She shook her head. “It does feel strange, being . . . this . . . again.”

He was quickly gaining assurance, settling into the situation. “I know. I’ve had practice in it,” light-years away, at the star when Alpha dwelt. “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be quite natural to you.”

”I have been here a little while myself. Nevertheless-Young,” she whispered, “but remembering a long life, old age, dying-“ She let the parasol fall, unnoticed, and stared down at her hands. Fingers gripped each other. “Remembering how toward the end 1 looked back and thought, ‘Was that all?’ “

He wanted to take those hands in his and speak comfort, but decided he would be wiser to say merely, “Well, it wasn’t all.”

”No, of course not. Not for me, the way it had been once for everyone who ever lived. While my worn-out body was being painlessly terminated, my self-pattern was uploaded-“ She raised her eyes. “Now we can’t really recall what our condition has been like, can we?”

”We can look forward to returning to it.”

”Oh, yes. Meanwhile-“ She flexed herself, glanced about and upward, let light and air into her spirit, until at last a full smile blossomed. “I am starting to enjoy this. Already I am.” She considered him. He was a tall man, muscular, blond, rugged of countenance. Laughter lines radiated from blue eyes. He spoke in a resonant baritone. “And I will.”

He grinned, delighted. “Thanks. The same here. For openers, may I ask your name?”

”Forgive me!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was prepared. I ... came into existence . . . with knowledge of my role and this milieu, and spent the time since rehearsing in my mind, but now that it’s actually happened, all my careful plans have flown away. I am-was - no, I am Laurinda Ashcroft.”

He offered his hand. After a moment she let him shake hers. He recalled that at the close of his mortal days the gesture was going out of use.

”You know a few things about me, I suppose,” he said, “but I’m ignorant about you and your times. When I left Earth, everything was changing spinjump fast, and after that I was out of touch,” and eventually his individuality went of its own desire into a greater one. This re-enactment of him had been given no details of the terrestrial history that followed his departure; it could not have contained any reasonable fraction of the information.

”You went to the stars almost immediately after you’d uploaded, didn’t you?” she asked.

He nodded. “Why wait? I’d always longed to go.”

”Are you glad that you did?”

”Glad is hardly the word.” He spent two or three seconds putting phrases together. Language was important to him; he had been an engineer and occasionally a maker of songs. “However, I am also happy to be here.” Again a brief grin. “In such pleasant company.” Yet what he really hoped to do was explain himself. They would be faring together in search of one another’s souls. “And I’ll bring something new back to my proper existence. All at once I realize how a human can appreciate in a unique way what’s out yonder,” suns, worlds, upon certain of them life that was more wonderful still, nebular fire-clouds, infinity whirling down the throat of a black hole, galaxies like jewelwork strewn by a prodigal through immensity, space-time structure subtle and majestic-everything he had never known, as a man, until this moment, for no organic creature could travel those reaches.

”While I chose to remain on Earth,” she said. “How timid and unimaginative do I seem to you?”

”Not in the least,” he avowed. “You had the adventures you wanted.”

”You are kind to say so.” She paused. “Do you know Jane Aus ten?”

”Who? No, I don’t believe I do.”

”An early nineteenth-century writer. She led a quiet life, never went far from home, died young, but she explored people in ways that nobody else ever did.”

”I’d like to read her. Maybe I’ll get a chance here.” He wished to show that he was no-“technoramus” was the word he invented on the spot. “I did read a good deal, especially on space missions. And especially poetry. Homer, Shakespeare, Tu Fu, Basho, Bellman, Burns, Omar Khayyam, Kipling, Millay, Haldeman-“ He’ threw up his hands and laughed. “Never mind. That’s just the first several names I could grab out of the jumble for purposes of bragging.”

”We have much getting acquainted to do, don’t we? Come, I’m being inhospitable. Let’s go inside, relax, and talk.”

He retrieved her parasol for her and, recollecting historical dramas he had seen, offered her his arm. They walked slowly between the flowerbeds. Wind lulled, a bird whistled, sunlight baked odors out of the roses.

”Where are we?” he asked.

”And when?” she replied. “In England of the mid-eighteenth century, on an estate in Surrey.” He nodded. He had in fact read rather widely. She fell silent, thinking, before she went on: “Gaia and Wayfarer decided a serene enclave like this would be the best rendezvous for us.”

”Really? I’m afraid I’m as out of place as a toad on a keyboard.”

She smiled, then continued seriously; “I told you I’ve been given familiarity with the milieu. We’ll be visiting alien ones-whatever ones you choose, after I’ve explained what else I know about what she has been doing these many years. That isn’t much. I haven’t seen any other worlds of hers. You will take the leadership.”

”You mean because I’m used to odd environments and rough people? Not necessarily. I dealt with nature, you know, on Earth and in space. Peaceful.”

”Dangerous.”

”Maybe. But never malign.”

”Tell me,” she invited.

They entered the house and seated themselves in its parlor. Casement windows stood open to green parkscape where deer grazed; afar were a thatched farm cottage, its outbuildings, and the edge of grainfields. Cleanly shaped furniture stood among paintings, etchings, books, two portrait busts. A maidservant rustled in with a tray of tea and cakes. She was obviously shocked by the newcomer but struggled to conceal it. When she had left, Laurinda explained to Christian that the owners of this place, Londoners to whom it was a summer retreat, had lent it to their friend, the eccentric Miss Ashcroft, for a holiday.

So had circumstances and memories been adjusted. It was an instance of Gaia directly interfering with the circumstances and events in an emulation. Christian wondered how frequently she did.

”Eccentricity is almost expected in the upper classes,” Laurinda said. “But when you lived you could simply be yourself, couldn’t you?”

In the hour that followed, she drew him out. His birth home was the Yukon Ethnate in the Bering Federation, and to it he often returned while he lived, for its wilderness preserves, mountain solitudes, and uncrowded, uncowed, plain-spoken folk. Otherwise the nation was prosperous and progressive, with more connections to Asia and the Pacific than to the decayed successor states east and south. Across the Pole, it was also becoming intimate with the renascent societies of Europe, and there Christian received part of his education and spent considerable of his free time.

His was an era of savage contrasts, in which the Commonwealth of Nations maintained a precarious peace. During a youthful, impulsively taken hitch in the Conflict Mediation Service, he twice saw combat. Later in his life, stability gradually became the norm. That was largely due to the growing influence of the artificial intelligence network. Most of its consciousness-level units interlinked in protean fashion to form minds appropriate for any particular situation, and already the capabilities of those minds exceeded the human. However, there was little sense of rivalry. Rather, there was partnership. The new minds were willing to advise, but were not interested in dominance.

Christian, child of forests and seas and uplands, heir to ancient civilizations, raised among their ongoing achievements, returned on his vacations to Earth in homecoming. Here were his kin, his friends, woods to roam, boats to sail, girls to kiss, songs to sing and glasses to raise (and a gravesite to visit. He barely mentioned his wife to Laurinda. She died before uploading technology was available). Always, though, he went back to space. It had called him since first he saw the stars from a cradle under the cedars. He became an engineer. Besides fellow humans he worked closely with sapient machines, and some of them got to be friends too, of an eerie kind. Over the decades, he took a foremost role in such undertakings as the domed Copernican Sea, the Asteroid Habitat, the orbiting antimatter plant, and finally the Grand Solar Laser for launching interstellar vessels on their way. Soon afterward, his body died, old and full of days; but the days of his mind had barely begun.

”A fabulous life,” Laurinda said low. She gazed out over the land, across which shadows were lengthening. “I wonder if ... they . . . might not have done better to give us a cabin in your wilderness.”

”No, no,” he said. “This is fresh and marvelous to me.”

”We can easily go elsewhere, you know. Any place, any time that Gaia has generated, including ones that history never saw. I’ll fetch our amulets whenever you wish.”

He raised his brows. “Amulets?”

”You haven’t been told-informed? They are devices. You wear yours and give it the command to transfer you.”

He nodded. “I see. It maps an emulated person into different surroundings.”

”With suitable modifications as required. Actually, in many cases it causes a milieu to be activated for you. Most have been in standby mode for a long time. I daresay Gaia could have arranged for us to wish ourselves to wherever we were going and call up whatever we needed likewise. But an external device is better.”

He pondered. “Yes, I think I see why. If we got supernatural powers, we wouldn’t really be human, would we? And the whole idea is that we should be.” He leaned forward on his chair. “It’s your turn. Tell me about yourself.”

”Oh, there’s too much. Not about me, I never did anything spectacular like you, but about the times I lived in, everything that happened to change this planet after you left it . . . .”

She was born here, in England. By then a thinly populated province of Europe, it was a quiet land (“half a-dream,” she said) devoted to its memorials of the past. Not that creativity was dead; but the arts were rather sharply divided between ringing changes on classic works and efforts to deal with the revelations coming in from the stars. The esthetic that artificial intelligence was evolving for itself overshadowed both these schools. Nevertheless Laurinda was active in them.

Furthermore, in the course of her work she ranged widely over Earth. (By then, meaningful work for humans was a privilege that the talented and energetic strove to earn.) She was a liaison between the two kinds of beings. It meant getting to know people in their various societies and helping them make their desires count. For instance, a proposed earthquake control station would alter a landscape and disrupt a community; could it be resited, or if not, what cultural adjustments could be made? Most commonly, though, she counseled and aided individuals bewildered and spiritually lost.

Still more than him, she was carefully vague about her private life, but he got the impression that it was generally happy. If childlessness was an unvoiced sorrow, it was one she shared with many in a population-regulated world; he had had only a son. She loved Earth, its glories and memories, and every fine creation of her race. At the end of her mortality she chose to abide on the planet, in the wholeness that was to become Gaia.

He thought he saw why she had been picked for resurrection, to be his companion, out of all the uncounted millions who had elected the same destiny.

Aloud, he said, “Yes, this house is right for you. And me, in spite of everything. We’re both of us more at home here than either of us could be in the other’s native period. Peace and beauty.”

”It isn’t a paradise,” she answered gravely. “This is the real eighteenth century, remember, as well as Gaia could reconstruct the history that led to it,” always monitoring, making changes as events turned incompatible with what was in the chronicles and the archeology. “The household staff are underpaid, undernourished, underrespected-servile. The American colonists keep slaves and are going to rebel. Across the Channel, a rotted monarchy bleeds France white, and this will bring on a truly terrible revolution, followed by a quarter century of war.”

He shrugged. “Well, the human condition never did include sanity, did it?” That was for the machines.

”In a few of our kind, it did,” she said. “At least, they came close. Gaia thinks you should meet some, so you’ll realize she isn’t just playing cruel games. I have”-in the memories with which she had come into this being-“invited three for dinner tomorrow. It tampers a trifle with their actual biographies, but Gaia can remedy that later if she chooses.” Laurinda smiled. “We’ll have to make an amulet provide you with proper smallclothes and wig.”

”And you provide me with a massive briefing, I’m sure. Who are they?”

”James Cook, Henry Fielding, and Erasmus Darwin. I think it will be a lively evening.”

The navigator, the writer, the polymath, three tiny, brilliant facets of the heritage that Gaia guarded.