Krake blinked at him. "But then—then—how will we ever find them?"
"Thrayl will find them for us," Marco assured him confidently. "He as much as said he would, didn't he?"
"Of course he will," Moon Bunderan put in as she entered the room, hand in hand with Sue-ling Quong. "Why did you ever doubt it?" She turned toward Krake. "And we've just looked in on the patient, Sue-ling and I, and he's doing fine."
"That's good," Francis Krake muttered, suddenly brought back to his loss. The glow on Sue-ling's face was a wound in his heart. He looked at her, trying to keep his face emotionless—or even happy for her, though that was hard. He did not want to see her like this, or to think of her being fiercely protective of Sork—or Kiri—or Kiri/Sork, whatever they might call this collective new person. He did not want to dwell on the picture of Sue-ling changing him, doing bedpan duty, hovering over him as he opened his eyes for the first time. . . .
He was, in short, jealous. He said, unaware of how revealing his words were, "I suppose he won't be out of danger for a long time, though—putting two brains in one skull—I guess it will be a miracle if he finally survives."
Sue-ling looked at him sharply. "Miracle? We don't need any miracle, Francis. He's going to make it."
He shrugged, unwilling to say more. She studied him for a moment before speaking. "Francis," she said, "that was an unusual operation, all right, but I had two unusual subjects. You know that Sork and Kiri were twins." He nodded curtly. "What you probably didn't know was that once they were what people used to call Siamese twins. They were a kind of genetic accident—not startlingly rare, but not common, either. Before they were born the doctors discovered they were physically linked together. In the old days, babies like that went to term and were born that way. Sometimes they had to go through their whole lives joined together—sometimes as circus freaks! But we're better than that now, of course. The Turtles helped. Their memmie doctors did some intrauterine surgery, separating the two babies while they still had a chance to develop normally."
"Normally," Krake repeated. His tone was neutral, but Sue-ling did not miss the sneer in the word itself.
She flared up. "You're damn right they were normal! Considering what they could have been, anyway. They were joined at the brain, Francis! They had only one brain between them. The surgeons had to separate them by cutting through the corpus callosum."
She had his full attention now. "Corpus—?"
"Callosum. It's the thing that links the right and left halves of the brain together. They did the operation while the embryos were still plastic, and so there was time for each to develop another half-brain to replace what was missing. But still—" She bit her lip. "You know there are differences between left- and right-brain types? That's what happened to them . . . only now the two halves are back together again. Francis, they won't only recover—they'll be better than ever, because they'll be one single person again!"
He looked at her in bafflement. It was all too much for him to take in.
"I hope so," he said. "I mean, I'm sure you're right, Sue-ling."
He stopped there, tugging fretfully at his beard, trying to think of something else to say. Congratulations? I hope the two of you—or the three of you?—will be very happy?
It was too much for him. He stood up, waving Daisy Fay to take over the board for him. "Call me when we've got some piloting to do," he said, to no one in particular, and lurched away toward his own room. He was too full of his own woes to notice the way Moon Bunderan was following him with her eyes, watchful, sympathetic . . . and confident.
In the great many-voiced rejoicing song of the aiodoi, as they welcomed thf one who returned, there was a special joy for the beings of Earth. Those beings did not know how they sang, nor did they hear the songs of others. They had never learned to listen, as the Taurs had long ago, but such learning could not be far away. And so the aiodoi listened with delight to another faint, faroff song from that tiny, distant planet. It was not even altogether a real song. It was hardly more than a verse, a fragment; but even that the all-hearing aiodoi heard, and welcomed.
"I'll tell you what Paul Davies says about those 'other universes' in the Everett many-worlds interpretation. He says that when we open the box on Schrodinger's cat what we find out isn't whether or not the cat died, but only which universe we are in.
"Remember, I am speaking of universes. Not just local
groups, like a galaxy or a cluster, but everythings. With their own spaces and dimensions and times. Every one of those universes is all the things any universe is. In their 'real time' the vacuum fluctuations will produce all the things any universe can exhibit—stars and metagalaxies and 'people'—oh, an immense number of people, or so one would like to believe, each of them of a kind but different from all others of its kind because they are individuals; each kind different from all the other kinds, but like them, too.
"At least in one respect they will all be alike.
"Eventually they will all die. And, sooner or later, so will their universes."
And the returning aiodos sang:
"And we will await them when they do."
20
Because photons have no clocks, even the longest voyage in a wave-drive ship winds somewhen to its end. This particular voyage was, to be sure, a very long one—a matter of several billion years ... or of several billion light-years, which as Einstein told the human world long ago are the same. Long before they had reached the end of it Krake was counting the remaining food supplies aboard The Golden Hind with the beginnings of real worry.
But there was still a reasonable margin left when the voyage ended. The external galaxies had receded to their proper remote places. The closer stars around them had swirled into nearly familiar constellations, and Marco's spectroscope confirmed that more and more of them had become the metal-rich objects of later generations.
When they came out of wave-drive at last, the space that surrounded the Mother planet was as Krake had first seen it, long and long ago. There was no great wormhole to threaten in the nearby sky. Instead, the baleful accretion disk of the old black hole hung on one side of their screens, menacing, dangerous, pocked with lightnings of hard radiation; the Sh'shrane-generated wormhole that had swallowed the Mother planet had not yet been formed. But the neutron star was in its proper place, looking no different, and the Mother planet itself swung just below them, to all appearances quite permanent there, exactly where Thrayl had promised.
The Taur gazed down at the stark, dimly lit planet in benign silence, his horns glowing with their milky light. Beside him Litlun was aquiver with excitement, his claws drumming on his belly plate. "It has really happened!" he rasped, almost like a prayer. "One can yet save the Brotherhood! We must land at once!"
Francis Krake didn't question that, but he had problems to solve. He had to plan a landing in the shadow of the planet itself, precisely navigated to avoid as much as possible of the deadly radiation from the black hole and the neutron star. More, he had to decide who was to make the trip down to the surface in the scout ship.
Two possible candidates were ruled out at once: There wasn't any way to bring the still unconscious Kiri/Sork (or Sork/Kiri) Quintero down to the surface of the planet; so he was naturally excluded. So was Sue-ling Quong, who flatly would not consider leaving the waveship without him. "And we have to leave at least two behind in the waveship," Krake said, considering. "Marco, Daisy Fay—I want you two to stay aboard to crew the ship, in case—"