There was so much to do in the years ahead. Rorden knew that he stood between two ages: around him he could feel the pulse of mankind beginning to quicken again. There were great problems to be faced, and Diaspar would face them. The recharting of the past would take centuries, but when it was finished Man would have recovered all that he had lost. And always now in the background would be the great enigma of Vanamonde—
If Calitrax was right, Vanamonde had already evolved more swiftly than his creators had expected, and the philosophers of Lys had great hopes of future cooperation which they would confide to no one. They had become very attached to the childlike supermind, and perhaps they believed that they could foreshorten the eons which his natural evolution would require. But Rorden knew that the ultimate destiny of Vanamonde was something in which Man would play no part. He had dreamed, and he believed the dream was true, that at the end of the Universe Vanamonde and the Mad Mind must meet each other among the corpses of the stars.
Alvin broke into his reverie and Rorden turned from the screen.
"I wanted you to see this," said Alvin quietly. "It may be many centuries before you have another chance."
"You're not leaving Earth?"
"No: even if there are other civilizations in this Galaxy, I doubt if they'd be worth the trouble of finding. And there is so much to do here—"
Alvin looked down at the great deserts, but his eyes saw instead the waters that would be sweeping over them a thousand years from now. Man had rediscovered his world, and he would make it beautiful while he remained upon it. And after that—
"I am going to send this ship out of the Galaxy, to follow the Empire wherever it has gone. The search may take ages, but the robot will never tire. One day our cousins will receive my message, and they'll know that we are waiting for them here on Earth. They will return, and I hope that by then we'll be worthy of them, however great they have become."
Alvin fell silent, staring into the future he had shaped but which he might never see. While Man was rebuilding his world, this ship would be crossing the darkness between the galaxies, and in thousands of years to come it would return. Perhaps he would be there to meet it, but if not, he was well content.
They were now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was an almost perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Alvin realized that he was seeing at one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect and so striking that he was to remember this moment all his life.
In this Universe the night was Jailing: the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered: and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.
19
The naked woman seemed to be dead. The four-winged bird which gyred down from a pale afternoon sky thought as much. It wheeled in lazy eights with the woman at the cross point, keeping the body under its precise gaze. It flapped easily, luxuriating in the loft of thermals from the rocky bluff nearby. Its forewings canted wind into the broad, gossamer-thin hindwings, bringing an ancient pleasure. But then directives ingrained in its deepest genes tugged it back to its assigned task: to find the living humans in this area and summon aid.
The brighter portion of its oddly shaped intelligence decided that this woman, who had not stirred for long minutes, was certainly dead. It made this decision not by reason but by a practical sense set long before it had come to know reason. The pebbles around her head were stained dark and a massive bruise had blossomed over her left ribs like a purple sunrise.
Already the bird had seen over twenty dead humans among the trees, charred to ash, and none living. It decided not to report this body as a possible candidate. That would take valuable time, and members of this curious, unimpressive subspecies of humans were notoriously fragile.
The four-winger had much rugged territory to cover and was running out of time. It hung for a long moment, indecisive as only a considerable intelligence can be, forewings rising as hindwings fell. Then the four-winger peeled away, eyes scanning every minute speck below.
The afternoon shadows lengthened considerably before the woman stirred, her weak gasping lost beneath the chuckle of the nearby stream. Her breath whistled between broken teeth.
This sound attracted a six-legged mother making her way with two cubs along the muddy bank. The woman's dying might have gained an audience then. But the sleek creatures saw that the woman distinctly resembled those who truly ruled here, though she smelled quite differently.
The mother instructed her cubs to note and always respect that form, now broken but always dangerous. She used a language simple in words but complex in positional grammar, inflections giving layers of meaning. She augmented this with deft signs, using her midlegs.
The family's quick flight downstream sent a tang into a crosswind which in turn roused the interest of a more curious creature. It was distantly descended from the simple raccoon, its pelt a rich symbol-laden swirl of red and auburn. This crafty intelligence quickly assessed the situation from the cover of stingbushes.
It was cautious but not afraid. To it, the most important issue here lay in interlacing the dying woman's jarring presence with the elaborate meaning of its own life. From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale— indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being. Such integration was complete and utterly beyond human ability, but emerged efl^ortlessly, the outcome of events in its evolution scattered through a billion years. The revival of its species a few centuries before had rendered with fidelity a creature in many ways superior to the pitiful figure it now watched intently.
At last, and with proper understanding of the pattern of events which might spread from its actions like the branches of an infinite tree, unending, the raccoonlike beast padded forward. It smelled the woman. There also came the sharp bite of fresh dung nearby where a small predator had passed some hours before, hesitated a moment, and then decided that the woman was a better prospect for tonight, when she would be safely dead. This information rippled atop the usual background flavorings of sunset: a crisp aroma of granite cooling, the sweet perfume of the eternal flowers, a musty odor of fungus drawing water up the hills from the muttering stream.
The woman's swollen skull was the worst problem. The optical disk bulged in both eyes. With long, tapered hands that echoed only faintly their origin in claws, the creature felt the unfamiliar cage of bones beneath the skin and muscle. The right arm was skewed unnaturally awry. Several ribs were cleanly snapped.
This specific form taken from the human spectrum had not existed in the time of the raccoon-creature's origin, so it was an interesting puzzle. The body's design was archaic, a patchwork of temporary solutions to passing problems. Yet evolution had sanctified these cumbersome measures with success in the raw, natural world.
The creature set about healing the body. It did not know how the woman came to be here or that she was in any way special. Gingerly it used techniques that were second nature, massaging points in this body which it knew emitted restoring hormones. It used its elbows—an awkward but unavoidable feature still not bettered in nature—to generate healing vibrations. The soft, swollen contusion in the right temple responded to rhythmic squeezing of the spine. The creature could feel pressures slowly relent and diffuse throughout the woman's head. Her glandular imperatives sluggishly closed internal hemorrhages. Stimuli to the neck and abdomen made her internal organs begin their filtering of the waste-clogged blood.
Dusk brought the rustle of movement to the creature's large ears, but none of the telltale sounds implied danger. The creature sat comfortably beside the sprawled woman and slept, though even then with an alertness the woman could never know. When she began to mutter the creature realized it could understand the slurred words.
"... get away . . . keep down . . . down . . . can't see us . . . from the air .
. ."
Much of her talk was garbled fever dreams. From brief moments of coherence the creature came to understand that the woman had been hunted remorselessly from a flyer, along with her tribe.
The tribe had not escaped. A dry night breeze coming off the hotter plains to the west brought the sickly sweet promise of flesh rotting in tomorrow's sun. The creature closed its nostrils to the smell.
The raccoon-being was pleasantly surprised that it could understand the woman's words. The lands here were filled with life-forms drawn from two billion years of incessant creation, and most of them could not fathom the languages of the others. This woman must have been taught—perhaps by genetic tuning—to comprehend the complex languages more advanced creatures used.
The large creature felt that to engrain such knowledge was an error, a skewed and perhaps arrogant presumption. An early human form such as this might well be confused by such complex, disorienting craft. Language arose from a world view. The rich web of perceptions which had formed her present tongue could scarcely ride easily in her cramped mental confines.
Normally it did not question the deeds of the advanced human forms called the Supras. But this badly mauled woman, her skin lacerated and turgid with deep bruises, raised doubts. Perhaps her injuries stemmed directly from her knowledge.
After some contemplation, however, its innate sense that life was a dusty mirror, reflecting only passing images of truth, told it that this woman was here for no ordinary reason. So it sat and thought and monitored her body's own weak but persistent self-repairing.
The woman lay beneath a night that gradually cleared as cumulus clouds blew in from the west and went on beyond the distant hills, as though hurrying for an appointment they could never meet. The creature sensed rising plumes of water vapor exhaled by the dense jungle and forest. These great moist wedges acted like invisible mountains, forcing inblowing air to rise and rain out its wet burden.
A great luminous band rose on the horizon, so bright and varied that it did not seem to be composed of stars, but rather of ivory and ice. Vast ragged lanes of dust sprawled across swarms of piercing light. These were the shreds of the galactic arm, a last rampart shielding the galactic center.
The raccoon-beast knew that Earth had been deflected toward this central hub long ago, before its own kind had evolved, when Earth was verdant for the first time. The scope of such an undertaking was beyond its comprehension. It dimly sensed that the humans of that time had made the sun pass near another star, one that refused to shine in the night.
A sharp veer around that dead, dark mass had sent the solar system plunging inward toward the great galactic bulge. The sun had crossed lanes of dust as the galaxy rotated, its spiral arms trailing like those of a spinning starfish. The constellations in Earth's nights warped and shifted. Ages passed. Life performed its ceaseless self-contortions. Fresh intelligences arose. Strange, alien minds came from distant suns.
The purposes of that time were shrouded in ambiguity. The sun had followed a stretched ellipse that looped close to the galactic center. A shimmering sphere of light gradually grew in the heavens. To remain near this wheeling beeswarm of ten billion stars, yet another encounter had proved necessary. That time, legend said, the sun had brushed by a giant molecular cloud. Each time, gravity's tugs rearranged the stately glide of the planets. The precision of those soft collisions had been of such delicacy that the new orbits fit the needs of further vast engineering enterprises—the dismantling of whole worlds. Such had humans been, once.
The raccoon-creature found a few planets—those which had survived that epic age of boundless ambition—among the great washes of light that hung above. Innumerable comet tails pointed outward from the sun toward gossamer banks of dim radiance. In such a crowded symphony of sky the slow gavotte of worlds seemed a minor theme.
But tonight the heavens stirred with luminous trouble. Staring upward, the raccoon-creature watched red and orange lights flare and dodge and veer. Soundless and involuted, these were the scribbles of swift combat. The bright traces faded slowly.
They were the first acts of hostility written on this broad sky for nearly a billion years. As before, they arose from the conflicts inherent in the minds of humans—that uneasy anthology of past influences.
Their reptihan subbrains, tucked around the nerve stem, preserved a taste for ritual and violence. Surrounding that, the limbic brain brought an emotional tang to all thoughts—this, an invention of the early mammals. Together, these two ancient remnants gave humans their visceral awareness of the world.
The furry creature which watched the flowering night knew, with a hard-won wisdom buried deep in its genes, that the battle above marked the emergence of something ancient and fearsome. Humanity's neocortex wrapped around the two animal brains in an unsure clasp. In some eras that grip had slipped, unleashing powerful bursts of creativity, of madness, of squandered energy.
The neocortex did hold sway with its gray sagacity, directing its reasoning power outward into the world. But always the deeper minds followed their own rhythms. Some forms of the human species had integrated this triune brain after heroic struggle. Others had engineered the neocortex until it mastered the lower two with complete, unceasing vigilance.
The raccoon-creature had a very different mind, the process of nearly a billion years more of design by both Darwinian winnowing and by careful pruning. Misgivings stirred in that mind now. The broad face wrinkled with complex, unreadable expressions. From its feral legacy it allowed itself a low, moaning growl colored with unease.
Very little of humanity's history had survived the rub of millennia. In any case that tangled record, shot through by discordant voices, would not have been comprehensible to this creature.
Still, it had a deep sense that it was witnessing in the streaked sky not a mere passing incident, but the birth of a savage new age. In the early eras of the human species, simpler minds had identified the dark elements of life with the random tragedies which humans suffered, from storm and disease and nature's myriad calamities. That time lay in the unimaginable past. Now humanity's greatest adversary had emerged again—not the unthinking universe, but itself. And so true evil had returned to the world.
20
The woman dreamed for two days.
She thrashed sometimes, calhng out hoarsely, her words slurred just beyond comprehension. The creature had carefully moved her to the shade of some tall trees whose branches formed curious curls like hooks at the very top. It foraged for simple fruit and held slices to the woman's mouth so the juice would trickle down her swollen throat. For itself small animals sufficed, which it caught by simply keeping still for long periods and letting them wander within reach. This was enough, for it knew how to conserve strength while never letting its attention wander from the woman's weak but persistent rhythms of regrowth.
The uses of fantasy are many, and healing is not the least of these. She slept not merely because this was the best way to repair herself. Behind her jerking eyelids a thin layer outside the neocortex brain was rerunning the events which had led to her trauma. This sub-brain integrated emotional and physiological elements, replaying her actions, searching for some fulcrum moment when she might have averted the calamity.
There was some comfort in knowing, finally, that nothing would have changed the outcome. When she reached this conclusion a stiffness left her and to the watching creature her body seemed to soften. Some memories were eventually discarded in this process as too painful to carry, while others were amplified in order to attain a kind of narrative equilibrium. This editing saved her from a burden of remorse and anxiety that, in earlier forms of humanity, would have plagued her for years after.
In the second day she momentarily burst into a slurred song. At dusk she awoke. She looked up into the long, tapered muzzle of her watcher and asked fuzzily, "How many . . . lived?"
"Only you, that I can sense." The creature's voice was low and yet lilting, like a bass note that had worked itself im
possibly through the throat of a flute.
"No . . . ?" She was quiet for a time, studying the green moon that swam beyond the mountains.
She said weakly, "The Supras . . ."
"They did this?"
"No, no. I saw some humans, like us, in flyers. The Supras were engaged ... far away. I thought they would help us."
"They have been busy." It gestured at the southern horizon. In twilight's dim gleaming a fat column of oily smoke stood like an obsidian gravestone.
"What's . . ."
"It has been there since yesterday." The looming distant disaster had strengthened the creature's resolution.
"Ah." She closed her eyes then and subsided into her curious, eyelid-fluttering sleep. For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge and survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominids walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition she would not have been by her own judgment a true human.
The next day she got up. Creaking unsteadily, she walked to the stream, where she lay facedown and drank for a long time. One finger was missing from her left hand, but she insisted on helping the creature forage for berries and edible leaves. She spoke little. They took shelter when silvery ships flashed across the sky, but this time there were no rolling booms of distant explosions, as she remembered from before. She did not speak of what had happened and her companion did not ask.
They came upon three humans crisped to ashes and she wept over each. "I never saw weapons before," she said. "Like Hving flames."
"Your enemy took care to thoroughly burn each."
She sifted through the shattered bones. "They had strange flyers. Cast down bolts, explosions . . ."
At evening meal she sang again the hypnotic slow song she had pushed up out of her dream-state before, her somber voice hanging on the long notes. Then her eyes abruptly filled and she rushed off into the bushes. Later she sheepishly returned, her mouth attempting a crooked smile, knowing that the need to cover emotion was a quirk of humans and would mean nothing to the raccoon-creature.