COME TO ME, PEOPLE OF TYREE! SAVE YOURSELVES HERE!
At his call the very darkness seems to boil around him, as though a monstrous strain is seeking release. Giadoc is too terribly drained to feel fear. Gathering their last strength, he manages one more cry:
USE THE BEAM! COME!
With that he falls fainting in upon his extinguished self, while the unknown pressure crests to culminance around him.
//ACTIVATE * ACTIVATE * ACTIVATE// the ghostly screen pleads.
And beyond the barrier, within the nucleus, what had been a woman’s phantom hand yields to overpowering urgency and goes at last to the spectral key.
On.
The world changes around them.
Chapter 20
In each mind, what happens then strikes differently.
The dying senses of Ted Yost hear a woman’s scream that ends in dark laughter, and feels salt spray sting his face.
Giadoc of Tyree, fainting into death, hears his cry echoed and amplified a millionfold, and knows that he has reached.
The sentience that had been born in the electronic artifacts of a minor planet succeeds at last in gaining access to the full circuitry of its new home.
The mind that had been Margaret Omali feels itself racked upon unearthly dimensions of experience, expanded to unhuman potency.
And the great being who for so long had drifted half-alive comes to full function around them.
A huge newborn voice speaks silently and with joyful wonder:
YES. NOW I UNDERSTAND.
Chapter 21
The strange symbiosis holds, the improbable interfaces mesh and spread. From spacebourne vastness through a small unliving energy-organization to the residual structure of a human mind with an odd relation to matter, information cycles. And power.
Enough of Margaret Omali is still left to cloak her new perceptions in human imagery. What happened? Some intolerable stress occurred, some great contradiction of underlying realities. The strain of incongruence had moved her to press to final activation, in whatever unearthly mode. She understands that her touch was needed: the problem or entity could not heal itself. Now it is done. She, or what was once she, puzzles remotely, trying to comprehend.
Stress is still present; she feels it. But now it is localized, a demanding something in the great starfield. She attends, and it focusses and magnifies the signals of a single small star. The star is throwing off shells of energy. That is correct, she feels; it has to do with some Plan.
But one aspect is wrong. It is that the peculiar emanations of life from a nearby mote of matter have risen, attained unbearable criticality. Action is overdue.
And as she perceives this, she perceives also that her action is taking place. Dreamily she feels herself stretch forth an arm across the light-years toward the angry little sun. Her phantom finger lifts: it freezes the explosion. As easily as she would fold back the petals of a flower, she feels herself folding back the flames spreading around the crying mote. The enormous powers of time are in her fingers, but she does not know this; she only feels the correctness of the act.
But it is not enough. Pain and death continue to scream at her from the speck in the fiery fringes. New action is imperative.
A force which she feels as her other arm flows toward the wailing thing. Her dream-hand touches, beckons. COME.
And a will which is hers and not hers draws forth the pain, lets it flow out and up to safety. At the same time, the energies of the great body outside her stronghold change and rise, stabilize at a new level appropriate to need. Provision is made. A richness begins to flow around her that she feels as good.
But just as the relieved tension crests to climax, a new perception sweeps her sensors and a dire new imperative is born.
Yes! She must take quite different, somehow unwelcome action. And meanwhile all this new experience must be deactivated, retired to stasis.
I must follow, I must search…
Chapter 22
I MUST FOLLOW, I MUST NOW BEGIN THE SEARCH!
WHAT JOY, WHEN THE VAST SPACEBOURNE BEING CAME TO ITSELF AT LAST, TO FIND THAT ITS WICKED INTEREST IN THE TINY EMANATIONS OF LIFE WAS NOT A MALFUNCTION AT ALL, BUT PART OF ITS PROPER ROLE IN THE TASK! NOT FOR ME THE ORDINARY TASKS OF DEMOLITION, IT EXULTS: I AM OF THE SAVERS OF LIFE!
YES, AND SOME LIFE HAS BEEN SAVED HERE, ALTHOUGH THERE IS NOT NOW TIME TO COMPLETE THIS PROGRAM. THE RACE HAS ALREADY LEFT, HAS GONE OUT BETWEEN THE STAR-SWARMS TO IDENTIFY A NEW TARGET. IT IS FOR THE LATE-BORN ONE TO FOLLOW, TO DEACTIVATE ITSELF AND ITS CARGO TO TRAVEL-MODE: TO SEARCH FOR THEM. WHEN IT FINDS THEM IT WILL BE TIME TO DISCHARGE ITS CARGO AND TAKE ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE NEW TASK. ALL IS AT LAST IN ORDER.
WHY THEN IS THERE STILL SADNESS?
IS IT BECAUSE THE SEARCH WILL BE LONG, EVEN WITH ITS ALL-BUT-INFINITE POWERS OF ACCELERATION? THE RACE LEAVES NO TRACE OF THEIR PASSING: EVERY LIKELY STAR-SWARM MUST BE INSPECTED, AND THE SEARCH WILL BE AT RANDOM. IT MAY TAKE FOREVER. BUT THE MIGHTY ENTITY IS PREPARED FOR THAT. IN TRAVEL-MODE ALL IS REDUCED TO THE SINGLE URGE OF QUEST, AND TO ANTICIPATION OF THE GREAT MOMENT WHEN THE SENSORS BRING NEWS OF THE PRESENCE OF THE RACE. THEN ALL CAN BE REACTIVATED AND THE PRESENT CARGO UNLOADED ON SOME MOTE SAFELY AWAY FROM THE ZONE OF OPERATIONS. AND THE GREAT BEING, NO LONGER LONELY, WILL TAKE UP ITS DUTIES AMONG THE SAVERS OF LIFE, ALL CORRECT AT LAST.
OR PERHAPS THE STRANGE GLOOM IS MERELY BECAUSE IT WAS SO LATE AWAKENED, SO THAT THE OTHERS ARE ALREADY GONE. WHY HAD IT BEEN SO LONG IN HALF-LIFE, SO SLOW TO BECOME COMPLETELY ENERGIZED? NO WAY TO KNOW; AND NO MATTER. NOW ALL IS CLEAR AND JOYFUL.
DEACTIVATE ALL INTERNAL SYSTEMS, THE ORDER GOES OUT. PREPARE TO LAUNCH OUT ON THE LONG, PERHAPS ENDLESS JOURNEY THROUGH THE VOID.
I MUST FOLLOW. I MUST SEARCH.
Chapter 23
Dying as he clings to his niche by the Destroyer’s nucleus, losing even the drained mind of Tedyost, Giadoc feels the Tyrenni come.
They come!
A torrent of naked life streams in tumult past him, a planetary jet of escaping lives upborne on the power of the strange Beam. As the dreamlike time stasis holds, up and out of their burning bodies flee young and old, male and female—each helping and being helped, carrying with them in their outrush even the dim lives of Tyree’s animals and plants. Up and up they come into the dark unknown, flinging themselves from their charred shriveling flesh, hoping because there is no other hope. And behind them the raging solar fires loom frozen for a timeless instant, a maw of flame held back from closing on its prey, while the living lightning-bolt pours out. They come, they arrive! All that still lives of Tyree comes whirling by, surging into the Destroyer’s dark holds.
And with the last weakest laggards comes something else: a huge silent presence from the depths of the perishing planet rises with them to the stars. It is the Great Field of Tyree, Giadoc knows faintly, reverently, as he feels it pass. Some of us believed it lived.
With that passing the great Beam fades, winks out and time snaps back. The ravening, held-back jaws of fire close. Giadoc knows that somewhere far away the physical world of Tyree is gone forever, a tumbling cinder in the wastes of space.
But around him in the vast darkness he can sense the surviving lives of Tyree spreading out, separating to a myriad scattered centers as they strive to reshape themselves from the mind-fields that buffeted and permeated them in their whirling flight. The empty spaces of the Destroyer begin to resonate with a small cloud of life-signals.
And the space is no longer as it was, he perceives wonderingly. The Tyrenni have not come as he did to darkness and nonbeing. The level has changed, energized; the strange unliving supports are far stronger now, rich with possibility. He feels even his own failing life being sustained, minutely strengthened; for a time he is being held from death.