"It used the quantum vacuum," Alvin said. His cheeks hollowed again with a cast of relief. The chance to be secure in his knowledge, Cley guessed.
Alvin leaned forward, his eyes soft as he peered into the dying firelight. "On average, empty space has zero energy. But by enclosing a volume with a sphere of conducting plasma, the Mad Mind prevented the creation of waves with wavelengths larger than that volume. These missing waves gave the vacuum a net negative energy, and allowed formation of a wormhole in space-time. All such processes are ruled by probabilities requiring great calculation. Yet through that hole the Mad Mind slithered."
"To our solar system," Cley concluded.
"Never before has a magnetic mind done this," Alvin said. "It escaped from the prison of time—a feat on such a scale that even the Empire did not anticipate."
Seeker whispered, "Coincidence, Alvin?" This was the first time Cley had ever heard Seeker use the name. There was a tinge of pity in the beast's voice, or what she took for that.
Alvin's head jerked up. He flicked a suspicious glance at Seeker. "The thought occurred to us, too. Why should the Mad Mind emerge now?"
"Just as you're getting free of Earth again?" Cley asked.
"Exactly," Alvin said. "So we studied all the physical evidence. Observed the path of damage the Mad Mind has wrecked as it left the galactic center." He hesitated. "And made a guess."
Seeker said, "It was you."
Alvin's eyes shifted away from the waning fire, as though he sought refuge in the gloom surrounding them. "Perhaps so. I found V^anamonde. The exuberance of anamonde was so great at being discovered! That sent magnetosonic twists through the whorls of an entire galactic arm. 1 hese reached the Mad Mind in its cage. To see
ancient foes reuniting again sent it into a rage, a malevolence so strong that it exerted itself supremely. And forced its exit."
They sat silently for a long moment. The inky recesses of the Leviathan were unrelieved by the distant promise of stars.
Cley said finally, "You didn't know. All the lore of Diaspar did not warn you."
He smiled mirthlessly. "But I did it. All the same."
Cley said, "That Empire might have troubled their mighty selves to make a jail that held."
Alvin shook his head. "There is none better in this space-time."
"Well, damn it, at least they shouldn't have just left it as a problem to be solved by us. "
Seeker lifted its snout, seeming to listen to something far away. Then it said, ""Shoulds and mights are of no consequence. The problem has arrived."
36
In the end it was like nothing she had expected or feared.
She lay in a comfortable vine mat in the Leviathan, alone, eyes closed. She felt nothing of it, or of her body.
The struggle raged red through landscapes of her mind.
The link with the Supras smoothed the harsh, glancing edges. Still, the cauldron of sensations was only a fragment of the broadening perspectives which opened for her in the hours and then days of the conflict.
She had anticipated great flares of phosphorescent energy, climactic storms of magnetic violence. There were some, but these were merely sideshow illuminations dancing around the major conflict hke heat lightning on a far horizon.
For Cley the struggle called upon her kinesthetic senses—overloaded and strained and fractured, splitting her into shards of disembodied perception. This was all she was capable of grasping.
Yet each splinter was intensely vibrant, encompassing.
She felt herself running, once. The pleasant heady rush of sliding muscles, of speed-shot perspectives dwindling, of slick velocities— and then she was in cold inky oblivion, her sun blocked by moving mountains. These moist shadows coiled with acrid odors. Harsh, abrasive air thrust up her nostrils.
The ground—like a plain of lead-gray ball bearings—slid by below her invisible feet, tossing like a storm-streaked, grainy sea. Sweet tastes swarmed up her sinuses, burst wetly green—and she tumbled into another bath of rushing impressions. Of receding depths. And then of oily forces working across her skin. It went on and on, a riverrun she could not stanch or fathom.
But at times she did sense pale immensities working at great distances, like icebergs emerging from a hurricane-racked ocean.
Dimly she caught shreds of a childlike mind, incomparably large, and recognized Vanamonde. It had prowled the solar system, she saw, blunting the attacks of the Mad Mind. She owed it her life, for surely the Mind would otherwise have found her on her outward voyage.
Beneath the ragged waves that washed her she felt infinitesimal currents, tiny piping voices. She recognized these as the recently grown Ur-humans, unformed personalities speckled by dots of kinesthetic tension.
They were all like elemental units in an enormous circuit, serving as components which relayed messages and forces they could no more recognize than a copper wire knows what an electron is.
And Seeker was there. Not the Seeker she knew, but something strange and many-footed, immense, running with timeless grace over the seamless gray plain.
Or was it many Seekers?—the entire species, a kind which had come long after the Ur-humans and yet was equally ancient now, a race which had strived and lost and strived again, endured and gone on silently, peering forward with a hollow barking laugh, still powerful and always asking as life must, and still dangerous and still coming.
And something more.
Seeker. It was engaged somehow at levels she could only glimpse. Seeker struggled in what seemed to Cley to be a crystal sphere— luminous, living. Yet the mote glaring at the sphere's center was a star.
She felt the plasma beings then. Nets of fields and ionized gas slipped fishlike through blackness. They converged on the Jove system. Great slow-twisting blue lightning worked through the orbiting rafts of life there. The mere backwash of this passing struggle scorched broad carpets of spacelife. Lances ruptured beings the size of whole worlds.
The biting pain of it made Cley twist and scream. Her eyes opened once to find her fingernails embedded in her palms, crimson blood streaking her arms. But she could not stop.
Her eyes squeezed shut against her will. A swelling seized her. She felt herself extended, warping the space around her as though she were herself a giant sun, bending rays of light.
She knew this meant she had somehow been incorporated into Vanamonde. But instantly another presence lapped at her mind. She felt herself tucked up into a cranny, snug—then yanked out, spilling into hot, inky murk.
The Mad Mind had her. It squeezed, as though she were moist fruit and would spit out seeds.
—an orange, crusty with age, browned and pitted, covered by white maggots sucking at the inner wealth.—
She saw this suddenly. Her mouth watered. She had to cleanse the slimy maggots before she could eat. She sent down fire and washed the orange in burnt-gold flame. Screaming, the maggots burst open.
—and the orange was a planet.—
Seared and pure and wiped free of the very atmosphere which had sustained the soft maggots.
—and the maggots, singed to oblivion—
They had been four-footed, scaly, quick of mind. But not quick enough. They had barely comprehended what rushed at them out of the maw at the center of the galaxy.
Cley was the orange and then the fire and then the maggots and then, with long strangled gasps, the fire again.
It was good to be the fire. Good to leap and fry and crackle and leap again.
Better by far than to crawl and mew and suck and shit and die.
Better, yes, to float and stream and tingle with blue-white fires. To hang in curtains between the stars and be greater than any sun that had ever flared. To roar at the jeweled stars.
Better to know and shimmer and reek. To rasp against the puny clots of knotted magnetic fields, butt into their slow waltzes. To jab and hurt and keep on hurting when the magnetic kernels had ground beneath you, broken, were dust.
Better to be a moving appetite again,
an intelligence bigger than solar systems. Pleasure seethed in its self-stink, more raw and muscular with every gathering moment.
—and she broke away from it for a moment, into what seemed to be cool open space, empty of the skittering violence.—
Ah, she thought with buoyant relief.
But it was merely another part of the Mad Mind. Oily and slick and snakelike, it slid itself over her. Into her ears. Up her vagina. Deep, deep probing for her ovaries. Down her throat, prodding with a fluid insistence.
A stench rose and bit into her. Its sharp beak cut and that was when she understood a flicker of what the outside struggle was about.
She suddenly knew that she now could feel abstractions. The partition between thought and sensation, so fundamental to being human, was blown to tatters by the Mind's mad gale.
Trapped, she understood.
The Mad Mind held that this universe was one of many expanding bubbles adrift inside a meta-universe. Ours was but one of the possibilities in a cosmos beyond counting.
The great adventure of advanced life-forms, it believed, was to transcend the mere bubble which we saw as our universe. Perhaps there were civilizations of unimaginable essence, around the very curve of the cosmos. The Mad Mind wished to create a tunnel which would prick a hole in our universe-bubble and extend into others.
Slimy blackness crept like fingers. Easeful ideas soothed into her.
The Galactic Empire, she saw, had been a festering pile of insects. When she stopped to see them better they were of all shapes, chitter-ing, filled with meaningless jabber.
Long ago some of these vermin had slipped away, she remembered, through the veils beyond the galaxy. Out, flying through strings of galaxies, across traceries of light. Spanning the great vaults and voids where few luminous sparks stirred.
Those Empire maggots had vanished, leaving dregs to slump into petrified cities: Diaspar. Lys.
And elsewhere in the spiral arms, other races had dwindled into self-obsessed stasis.
But should the holy, enduring fire follow the Empire across the curve of this universe? Should the Mind pursue?
She knew instantly that such goals were paltry. The stuff of maggot-minds.
No—far grander to escape the binds of this universe entirely. Not merely voyage in it. Not simply skim around the sloping warp.
Cley struggled but could find no way through the cloying hot ink that oozed into her throat, her bowels.
She faintly felt that these turgid sensations were in fact ideas. She could not comprehend them as cool abstractions. They reeked and banged, cut and seared, rubbed and poked at her.
And on this stage ideas moved as monstrous actors, capable of anything.
She understood now—as quickly as she could frame the question—what the Madness cloaking her wanted. It desired to create deep wells in space-time. Compression of matter to achieve this in turn required the cooperation of many magnetic minds—for in the end, only intelligence coolly divorced from matter could truly control it.
The risk of such a venture was the destruction of the entire galaxy. Fresh matter had to be created and compacted. This could curve space-time enough to trap the galaxy into a self-contracting sphere, cut off from the universe even as it bled downward into a yawning gravitational pit.
The galaxy could not accept such danger. The magnetic minds had debated the wisdom of such a venture while the Mad Mind was confined. Their discussion had been dispassionate, for they were not threatened. Magnetic intelligences could follow the Mad Mind beyond such geometric oblivion, since they were not tied to the fate of mere matter.
But the galaxy brimmed with lesser life. And in the last billion years, as humanity slept in Diaspar, life had integrated.
Near most stars teemed countless entities, bound to planets or orbiting them. Further out, between the suns, the magnetic structures looked down on this with a slow, brooding spirit. Their inability to transcend the speed of light except in tiny spots meant that these most vast of all intelligences spoke slowly across the chasms of the galactic arms.
Yet slowly, slowly, through these links a true Galactic Mind had arisen. It had been driven to more complex levels of perception by the sure knowledge that eventually the Mad Mind would escape.
So the magnetic beasts could not abandon the matter-born to extinction. They had ruled against the Mad Mind's experiment before, and now they moved to crush the newrisen Mind before it could carry out the compression of mass.
Cley saw this in a passing instant of struggle, while she swam in a milky satin fog—and then immeasurably later, through sheets the colors of blood and brass. She was like a blind ship adrift, with only the gyroscope of her senses of any use.
The pain began then.
It soared through her. If she had once thought of herself and the other Ur-humans as elements in an electrical circuit, now she understood what this could mean.
The agony was timeless. Her jaws strained open, tongue stuck straight out, pink and burning. Her eyes bulged, though still squeezed shut by a giant hand which pinched her nose. She was terrified and then went beyond that to a longing, a need for extinction simply to escape the terror. Her agony was featureless. No tick of time consoled her. Her previous life, memories, pleasures—all dwindled into nothing beside the giant flinty mountain of her pain.
She longed to scream. Alvin! Muscles refused to unlock in her throat, her face. Timeless excruciation made her into a statue.
And then without transition she was standing, water cascading all over her, her hair bunched atop her head, her shoulders and breasts white with soapy smears. Her prickly flesh shimmered and melted and her nipples were fat spigots. They snagged bubbles and dripped rich drops. The air eagerly lapped these teardrops as they fell. Her eyes were closed but she could see a pulse flutter in her throat, satin moistness slither over her pendulous breasts.
She knew that this, too, was part of the Mind. Or a last brushing kiss from it. For it was genuinely mad, and contained within it a skein that humans would see as love, or hate, or malignant resolve. But these were categories evolved for a species. Ihey no more described another class of being than violins and drums describe a storm.
Some of its madness was human. Lodged in magnetic helices lay the mentality of Man. Several races had made the Mind and each left a signature.
The Mind's ambition, to escape the bands of space-time itself, was born of humanity. And lacing through the pain were streaks of ancient guilt.
Alvin had known this, she saw. That was some of the weight he carried.
The Mind had come from a substrate of magnetic beings, too. She felt them now, ponderous and eerie.
They brimmed throughout the solar system. Their intelligences were neither higher nor lower than humans', for they were not born from evolutionary forces which had driven humanity to solve problems. They had survived by altering their perceptions. How this happened Cley could not fathom.
But for a sliding instant she caught a glimpse of humanity, from their view.
A great eagle hung in black space, near a sulfurous planet, its wings flapping long and lazy. Diamond-sharp eyes glinted. The beak hung slightly open, as though about to call out a booming song. She watched the flex of the immense feathers for a while as muscles bulged beneath the wings. Only then did she see that the bird flew between the planet behind it and toward a sun in the distance, a star red and hairy with immense chromatic flares.
And across the span of the immense wings nestled small, fevered mites. At one wingtip rose pyramids. Mountains capped in white framed broad plains, which in turn lead to silvery, spiky cities. Across the wingspan lay ages of greatness and long nights of despair. But always the ferment, the jutting towers of boundless ambition, the dusty ruins brought by wear and failure. At the far wingtip a fogged land lay, just beyond her ability to make out detail.
Humanity. All who had ever carried the gleam kindled behind the searching eyes—they were there.
Gathered in time's long tapest
ry, aback the eagle. They milled and fought and saw only their limited moment. They did not know that they flew between unreadable spheres, in the perfumed air of vast night.
As the bird flapped past her, it turned. The glinting black eyes looked at her once, the beak opened slightly. Then it turned away and flew on. Intent. Resolute.
There came a moment like an immense word on the verge of being spoken.
And then it was over.
She sat up. The vines holding her were like rasping hot breaths.
She vomited violently. Coughed. Gasped.
Brown blood had caked thick and crusty at her wrists. Her fingernails had snapped off. The tips were buried in her palms. Numbly Cley licked them clean.
"Have a rat," Seeker said. It held up a green morsel on a forked stick.
Alvin!
She shook her head and was sick again.
"It's done," Seeker said.
"I . . . Who won?"
"We did."
"What . . . what . . ."
"Losses?" Seeker paused as though listening to a pleasant distant song. "Billions of lives. Billions of loves, which is another way to count."
She closed her eyes and felt a strange dry echo of Seeker's voice. This was Seeker's talent. Through it she witnessed the gray, blasted wastes that stretched throughout the solar system. Bodies crushed and scorched. Leviathans boiling away their guts into vacuum. Moons melted to slag.
"The Mad Mind?"
"Eaten by us," Seeker said.
"Us?"
"Life. I'he Galactic Mind."
She Still caught frayed strands of Seeker's ebbing vision. "You see it all, don't you?"
"Only within the solar system. The speed of light constrains."
"All life? On all the worlds?"
"And between them."
"How can you do that?"
Seeker pricked up its outsized ears. Waves of amber and yellow chased each other around its pelt. "Like this."
"Well, what's that?''
"This."
In a glimmering she saw fragile, lonely Earth, now the most blighted of all the worlds. But it had been diminished by humans, she saw; the Mad Mind had not injured it. Sentinel Earth had played its role and now could return to obscurity. Or greatness.