But the T'Worlie did not at once obey. It hung in midair, its filmy wings moving slowly as the longest-range of its five patterned eyes peered ahead of them. The TWorlie were almost never agitated, but there was something shaky in its shrill whistle as it spoke: "Statement: Person or persons approaching rapidly. Recommendation: Caution. Further statement—"
And then it fell silent for a moment, hovering . . . and then, in a manner most unT'Worlielike, it whistled raggedly, "Also coming— Not physically coming— Imminently approaching—"
And then it did something no T'Worlie had ever done in the presence of a member of another race. It screamed.
The Pmals could find no comprehensible translation, and did not try. They simply reproduced the whistling, warbling sound of terror; and broke off when the T'Worlie collapsed upon itself, its five eyes staring emptily, its wings in helter-skelter disarray, and slowly, slowly settled to the floor of the corridor.
There was a time, and not long in coming, when Jen Babylon comprehended all things at once, with a terrible knowledge that hurled huger and newer questions at him . . . but that time had not yet arrived. To Jen, the next few moments were utter, anarchic madness. Everything seemed to happen at once. Even while the Pmals were pouring the T'Worlie's scream of horror and disbelief into his ears, there were two other sounds. Doris, the Purchased Person—she was screaming, too, if you could call the low, ecstatic moan that came from her hps a scream. Her face was rapt, her eyes blazing with an emotion Babylon could not read—
And at the same time—
The silver girl lifted herself on her great wings and hurled herself at Babylon. She too was screaming, but words emerged from the Pmaclass="underline" "A force! I perceive a new concentration of energies!" She collided with him, thrust something into his hands—
And at the same time—
Two figures burst out of the tunnel, one tinier than the other but both inhumanly short. They stopped abruptly as they caught sight of the org-riding group, but then the smallest of them cried out and came on, throwing itself at Zara Doy, wrapping his arms around her knees with a heartrending shout of Mama—
And at the same time—
The noise from the end of the corridor rose to a great rapturous shout—
And at the same time—
The thing in Jen Babylon's hands reached out with impalpable tendrils and caught at his mind. It was the helmet. He knew that. He knew, too, that there was a surge of rawly horrifying energy coming from it that threatened to sweep him away through its mere touch, that would surely change him irrevocably and forever if he did not release it at once.
But he could not.
His arms had a life of their own. They lifted the helmet and settled it on his head.
And Jen Babylon's world changed forever.
There was a part of Jen Babylon that did not change. It merely—increased. That part of him was able to see the tiny figure that flung itself at Zara Doy and recognize it— grievously squashed, distorted, and hideous, it was nevertheless the little boy he had seen, an eternity ago, with that other Zara Doy in the Tachyon Base. That part of him was able to feel the rake of the silver girl's wingtips as she convulsively struggled against whatever had her in its grip, observe the lustrous gleam of her almost human body, feel its inhuman cold and rigidity. That part of him felt pain. But that part of him was now submerged in a larger self, as if a color-blind man were suddenly seeing a rainbow, a tone- deaf man hearing music; as if fingers that had never touched anything but themselves now reached out to palp a world.
Like that—but more than that. There were no words. The truth was something for which words did not exist! There could be only analogies and approximations; and the closest words could come to truth was to say that Jen Babylon, all of him, was exploding. Was both the Ground Zero and the infinitely expanding wavefront that was the blast itself.
But that was metaphor. For the reality there were no words.
There were no words to say how, as he exploded past tunnel walls and caverns, past the inner shell of Cuckoo, past every material object within its gravitational range, he reached and tasted each of its myriad creatures, and each of its myriad, myriad atoms.
There were no words to describe how he felt each feeling those beings felt, Doc Chimp's quivering horror, Zara's terrible blend of horror and love as she enfolded the caricature of her son, David's panicked longing, the raw emotions of Ben Pertin and Te'ehala Tupaia, of Redlaw and the battered, semiconscious TWorlie, of Org Rider and even of the orgs themselves.
There were no words to convey the billion-piece symphony of tastes and feelings that he sampled from the countless denizens of Cuckoo's shell, demented Watchers and sullen savages, of a thousand shapes and a thousand million states of mind.
There were no words to convey the sight that opened up before him, the great skeletal shell of Cuckoo itself, and within its curved embrace the restlessly seething auroras of plasma, the distant, bright sun, the immensity spanned by this wall around a star.
And there were, finally, no words to say what he felt when he knew that he was not alone. That even this immense new being was tiny beside its neighbor, newborn and unsuspected; that he was naked in the awful presence of ONE far greater than himself.
NINETEEN
And now my mission is near its end, for HE is waking.
The great machine stirs in all its hidden places, and reports to me. Even the parts that have lain silent for all the thousands of centuries now are commanded to life, and they respond. The desecrators who forced the new intrusion into HIS sacred fabric have been dealt with, and once more the masterwork that is HIS body has proven invulnerable, even to nuclear attack. As HE constructed it to be.
Now at last HIS vast design fulfills itself.
The guardians of the frozen crypts move and wake, and send out their sensors. First to their organic charges: Are they safe? Have any suffered damage? Need they clone new samples for the store? Then they reach out to HIM for instructions. There are none yet. But they will not be long in coming.
The custodians of the great driving jets at the poles wake. They check their plasma reserves and test their power charges and their controls. It is not yet time for them, but they are ready. When they are needed they will guide our great machine-egg into its fresh galactic nest.
And I am ready—ready to end the long, lonely watch over the great round machine and all its myriad tenants and parts.
I reach out to all my sleeping members. They have rested, blind and uncaring, in the bubbles of a thousand separate memory stores, for the thousands and thousands of years since they were themselves alive, before they became, like me, charged particles dancing about the interfaces of the immense machine.
Was I once, like them, alive? I cannot remember.
But they were! And what things they were, back in the home galaxy, before HE was born out of the need to flee its fires. Great gray starfish from the ammonia slime of seas that never saw their sun. Ethereal wisps of gas clouds that needed no star. Creatures like insects and creatures like rocks, creatures of all shapes and chemistries; creatures that were old when HE was only a theory, and creatines that HE planned and bred and nursed to ripeness in a spiral arm, even when the galactic core was exploding and the central stars were being devoured by the tens of millions.
And then they, too, were devoured . . .
As I am about to be devoured . . .
For HE is awake now, and come into HIS glory, and I—I cease to exist—