The host-entity, Yael of Dragon, was retired with honor and granted a Society of Hosts pension. The young guard who had discovered the first hostage of Outworld, March (the name, originated as a code, but he elected to retain it), was feted regally and offered anything in the Segment he might desire. He chose Yael. They married and carved out a pleasant ranch in back-vine Outworld, and their children had a pet dinosaur.
Slammer the magnet recovered his body and son. The magnets were granted civilized status, and developed a considerable fleet of spaceships, as they were well suited to economical space travel, requiring neither atmosphere nor gravity on any regular basis. In due course Sphere Magnet joined Segment Etamin, and contributed its first representative to Segment government: an entity by the name of Beanball.
Galaxy Andromeda, having twice erred by casting lascivious desires on the energy of her neighbor, was now chained. For a thousand Solarian years she was contemptuously reviled by sapient species elsewhere in the galactic cluster. The cultures of Spheres * — / :: and oo stagnated, and not merely at their regressive Fringes. Their need for massive new energy had been critical, and remained so; civilization could not be maintained at its prior level.
But the mystery of the Ancients remained hidden. Slowly, inevitably, the level of civilization in the cluster declined, for the available energy was being depleted. It seemed that modern sapients were doomed never to approach the technological level of the Ancients, let alone to comprehend the secret of the Ancients’ demise.
Suddenly, the greatest threat of alclass="underline" the Space Amoeba. It threatened to engulf the entire cluster. There was only one possible way to oppose it: to achieve the immediate breakthrough of complete Ancient science. Under this imperative, a new figure appeared in Cluster history.
This was an entity of lowly, oppressed Sphere Slash of Andromeda, who sought to fulfill the plea of his ancestral kin Llume that Sphere slash redeem its honor. He possessed the third and greatest of the phenomenal auras.
His Kirlian rating was 236, and in certain respects his adventure was to be the most remarkable of the three. He was known colloquially by his twin professions: Herald the Healer.
His thrust into history was the Kirlian Quest.