She pulls.
With a silent jolt like a tremendous arc of great circuits violently broken, the thing in her dream-hands yields, crashes emptily open and vanishes. Around her the last imperative of the great Task is stilled forever.
In total disorientation Margaret Omali collapses or fragments backward through or onto Dann, knowing she has done it. Everything has changed. She has power here now. But she is at last truly and inextricably merged with the vast entity in which they ride.
Dann, she finds, is still here, or part of him, being hugged by the child. Through him she can sense the commotion outside, as human and alien entities reel backward in disorder. And more: All over the great space outside, the power is rising again, the hum of life stirring again to be as it was before.
But one thing has not changed. As the living energies within the nucleus come slowly to a new organization, the figure against the stars is still there. Presently it half-turns; its carven lips no longer sad but only grave. A voice of silence speaks:
I WILL FIND A NEW TASK. PERHAPS… IN TIME… I WILL TAKE COUNSEL WITH LIFE.
Chapter 27
The curious constellation of negative entropy that still calls itself Daniel Dann is no longer on his life-way, albeit his travels are only beginning.
He has no idea what he is, or appears as, physically. Most likely a double-ended strand of life-energy, he thinks; I am wedged in the “gap in the Destroyer’s nucleus wall and part of me is outside. But the passage is no longer menacing and frightful, he is not squeezed by icy dangers. Indeed, he has indulged himself in comfort. In the high energies of this place he has found it easy to fashion a simulacrum of his old familiar body in its armchair, and he lounges like a watchman at her gate.
Here he can monitor all approaches from without or call for help if need be, while his inner gaze stays fixed on that which he most wishes to perceive.
Within is a scene of grandeur. The incandescent beings of space blaze forth in glory. So beautiful, stupendous; by itself it would be almost enough for melancholy eternity. But the magnificence is only background. Limned in starlight, she is remotely there. Her head is turned away; he has only occasional glimpses of her grave, serenely thoughtful profile. His nonexistent heart does not leap when he beholds her; rather, a deep and wordless joy suffuses him. No sadness, no pain is here in the starry night.
But that is not all. All around, on some other dimension of perception, tier upon tier of mysterious controls reach into the shadows. And sometimes another apparition of Margaret comes to ponder and test the great console. In this form she is as he had known her in life, a mortal woman’s lean body in a white coat. Incarnated so, she will sometimes speak to him quite normally, and what passes for his heart does check when he “hears” her voice. Now and again they have even talked at length, as when they walked a vanished woodland. He has told her of the happenings to the other humans, and of beautiful doomed Tyree and its people, and heard her laugh and sigh. But then the great board claims her, and she goes again to her enigmatic tasks; learning, he guesses, the powers of her new estate.
But beyond this is the most precious of alclass="underline" At certain times the child comes back and gazes curiously at him, or asks him questions, mostly of the stars. He answers as best as he can, explaining what wonders he knows. But his knowledge ends pitifully soon, and then the child laughs and goes off to work a small, earthly keyboard below the inhuman console. Together they puzzle out the answers and marvel at the celestial grandeurs she can summon. These moments are surpassingly dear to him. He surmises that what he sees as a child is some deep, enduring core of Margaret’s human wonder and delight.
Once she asks him, “Why are you such a funny color, Dan’l?”
Thinking to please her, he imagines his skin darker, his features those of a black man with grey hair. The child bursts out giggling and from the shadows comes Margaret’s brief laugh. “Don’t.” He never tries to change himself again.
He understands now, of course: There is no question of “rescuing” Margaret, of freeing her from this power and place. She has gone beyond that, beyond humanity. This is her realm now. She is merged, or merging, with the great entity around them. He is seeing only temporary phantasms or facets of her; her real self is involved beyond his ken.
Once when the familiar Margaret is there he asks her, “Are we in a ship? Is all this a machine?”
Her dark gaze focusses beyond him.
“No.”
He has not cared nor dared to ask her more.
But there have been events from the outside.
At first they are merely isolated moments of contact with Waxman. The double being seems to have stationed himself watchfully nearby, content to exist in his new unity, interested in serving as a kind of news-center for humans and Tyrenni. But soon after what Dann thinks of as the great victory, the warm touch he recogines as Winona comes to speak directly to him.
“Doctor Dann, is Margaret all right in there? I’ve been so worried about her. Could I see her for a moment? I don’t want to bother her, I just want—”
“I understand,” he tells her. And he does, he cannot mistake pure friendship, or whatever odd human quality “worries” about another so gratuitously. “I’ll ask her. It’s difficult. She’s… busy.”
The mild presence withdraws patiently.
When the Earthly incarnation of Margaret comes again into his sight, he asks her. “Can Winona, ah, make contact with you for a few minutes? She was your friend, you know. She’s worried.”
“Winona?” The dark priestess of the computer hesitates remotely. But her mood seems favorable. “Yes. You can let her by.”
Dann has a selfish moment of gladness at her acceptance of his role of guardian of her gates. Cerberus-Dann. He does not know exactly how to “let” Winona in, but moves his imaginary self aside, calling her name. It seems to work. He feels life coming inward.
Shockingly, what materializes at the imaginary door is not Winona—it is the trim lush figure of a dark-haired woman in early middle life, with a brilliant, unlined, eager face. His Earthly memories leap up. Here is the incarnation of young mother, a woman he has seen step laughing from a thousand stationwagons full of kids.
But as he leaps to bar this stranger’s way, she changes. The firm flesh pales and sags, the raven hair goes grey. It is Winona as he knows her, going toward Margaret with both hands held out.
For an instant he flinches, expecting the giggle and rush of words. But she only takes one of the tall figure’s hands in hers, and holds it to her old bosom, peering in wonder at the strangeness all around. For a moment some contact seems to flow, and then Winona releases the hand and turns away.
As she passes Dann there is another shimmer of change; it is the radiant young matron who vanishes out through the immaterial chink.
Dann muses on the dreadful mysteries of time; that which he had seen was really Winona, not the puffy arthritic scarecrow of Deerfield.
And what is he, really? Some earnest figure of a young MD? No; he is ineluctably old. His dead are dead. He is… content.
Outside, Winona has gone away. She understands, Dann knows, however she conceives it. Margaret is not to be worried about.
And something else has happened, he notices. As he resumes his watchman’s pose he senses that the guarded gate of the stronghold seems a little wider now. Less fortified. The Margaret who has her being here will perhaps tolerate contact with life a little more. But she is, Dann realizes, changing. Life is no longer to her what it was. His soul is chilled by foreboding. Will she change beyond recognition, will everything he knows as Margaret disappear into some cloudy matrix of immensity?