“We need to know.”
“How could it have started?” I heard my voice thin and shivery.
“That’s what we really need to know,” Guthrie said. Each word struck after the next, like blows on a nail head. “Wreckage from a ship—or what?—how many ages ago? Or deliberate seeding? Were the crew organic… or were they not? We’ve never found spoor of any intelligent beings besides us and our creations. Until now—maybe. Remember, on Earth, it’s the cybercosm that rules, minds more powerful than we believe anything in a biocosm can ever become. What are they doing? What may other cybercosms have been doing? We dream our dreams of the future. What may theirs be?”
He gazed past me, beyond the sky. “I told my Demeter the question ‘Why?’ is meaningless. I was mistaken. We all thought we’d learned some of the basics in the Universe. We were mistaken.”
The stream rustled past us on its way to the sea.
Guthrie straightened at my side. Light poured across the image of his living face. “We’ve got to set that right,” he said.