Strider's Universe

Life Begins at Death

The Main Computer knew, of course, what the organics were plotting: they were going to get into their little spacecraft and then cut loose, hoping that their tachyon drive would baffle it as they fled across the Universe away from Artificial Environment 17,863,006. The thing called Strauss-Giolitto had said that the organics didn't know how to conquer what it called the Shift, but the Main Computer didn't believe it. Organics could be trusted to do only one thing: lie.

As soon as the Main Computer—and the environment itself—could sense that the organics were indeed enshipped it locked the three small ships to itself.

They were a minor threat that could be dealt with later. In a few hundred thousand years Artificial Environment 17,863,006 would find the small elliptical galaxy—hardly more than a globular cluster—which the Strauss-Giolitto thing had referred to as The Wondervale, the haven of the descendants of the Helgiolath. A bit longer than a few hundred thousand years, actually: there was a chance that Artificial Environment 17,863,006 wouldn't make it before the Universe began to contract. Where, after all, was The Wondervale?

Somewhere near but not in the galaxy the organics called Heaven's Ancestor.

There was a swift exchange of ideas between the Main Computer and Artificial Environment 17,863,006.

Yes: co-opt the puters of the three smaller craft.

It was easy enough to infiltrate the organics' puters: all the Main Computer and Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had to do was stroke the exterior of their software and they responded readily. They wanted to help.

The coordinates slipped easily into the Main Computer, who copied them to Artificial Environment 17,863,006. The two debated further: they had overheard the organics talking about the possibility that the Helgiolath might have infested galaxies other than The Wondervale—galaxies that might be nearer to here. They pushed aside the speculation: power was cheap, and it was better to go for a lair they knew of rather than spend aeons exploring elsewhere. Once they had exterminated the enemy throughout The Wondervale they could return here to the Twin Galaxies or they could carry on roaming elsewhere. Some of the organics had talked about a galaxy they named the Milky Way.

That could be interesting.

"I have some bad news," said Hein, turning round from the Pocket.

Strider glowered at him. "On this particular exploit, that comes as no surprise."

"The drive refuses to initiate."

"Whaddya mean? How can the bloody drive refuse to do anything it's told to do? Are you saying it's bust?"

Hein shrugged apologetically. "Let me rephrase that, Leonie. Our Main Computer is for some reason refusing to initiate the drive."

She thought for a moment. She had always had at the back of her mind a pervasive doubt that the deal with Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was as open and shut as it appeared.

"Hook up with Orphanwifer and the Onurg and see if they're having the same trouble," she said. "I'll see if Pinocchio or Tenper can bring us any goddam enlightenment."

Hein returned his head to the Pocket.

"You hear that, Images?" said Strider to what was now in effect an empty command deck. No, not so empty. Again there was one of those rare occasions when she caught out of the corner of her eye a multicolored flicker that indicated one of the Images was present.

She heard the trill of Ten Per Cent Extra Free's voice in her mind.

The Main Computer aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 has persuaded our own AIs to do its bidding.

"How the hell could it do that?"

It has hypnotized them.

"That's impossible. You can't bloody hypnotize a puter. Their intelligences just don't work that way!" She stared, hands on her waist, at the place where she thought she had seen the glint of colored light. "Tell us another one, Tenper."

It is the nearest analogy I can make to what the machine has done.

"Well, try and get a bit nearer, huh?"

It, combined with Artificial Environment 17,863,006 itself, is by far the most powerful puter we have ever come across. It has been able to inveigle itself into the peripheral software of the puters of our three ships, and thereby been able to cast a glamour over the remainder. They are agreeing to its requests as surely as if they were obedient children.

"Run that 'casting a glamour' bit past me again."

You could call it a magical spell.

"Magic? Tenper, has something gone seriously askew in whatever it is you Images have for a brain?"

What is technology but magic by another name?

Yes. She remembered. As far back as the twentieth century some guy called Click or Clarge or Clarke or something had pointed out that any technology significantly more advanced than one's own was indistinguishable from magic. Someone else had come along later and pointed out that what the guy should really have said was "any technology significantly different from one's own." Either way, it didn't matter: she realized what Tenper was trying to get across to her.

Oh, boy. Magicked by a puter.

"Is there any way you can unmagic us?"

No. We have found no way. Pinocchio is still trying. Since he was earlier an AI himself, it is possible that he may have greater success than I have had.

"Well, let me know soonest."

We shall.

"Good."

And there are three further things, Captain Leonie Strider.

"Oh, great."

Artificial Environment 17,863,006 has secured you firmly to its sides. It has hypnotized your puters further to ensure that, even if you wanted to open your airlocks, you would not be able to do so. And it has already begun to—

Hein, no longer standing at his Pocket, interrupted: "Gear up its own drive to take us back to Heaven's Ancestor."

"Well, that's progress of a sort," said Strider.

"From there it plans to get to The Wondervale and wipe out the Helgiolath." Hein looked sick. "I don't know if there's any way we can stop it from doing that. They're not a species I can trust with any confidence, but I can't be easy with the idea of them being exterminated."

Strider stared at him. "Neither can I. But I don't think it'll come to that. I've had a sudden thought as to how—just maybe—we can get out of this." She modulated the pitch of her voice so that it was clear she was addressing Ten Per Cent Extra Free again. "I want to speak with Maria. Is it possible to find some place aboard this boat where our own Main Computer won't be able to hear us and report back everything to the hypnotist?"

I can probably briefly disable the puter.

"Right. Wait 'til I find her and do just that."

Kaantalech drowsed in her fortress on the innermost moon of Alterifer. Last night—although "night" was a somewhat abstract concept to any spacefaring species—she had dined heavily and also ingested a fair quantity of recreational drugs. She didn't feel ill in her early-morning doze, but her body did seem a bit . . . leaden. Still, there was no reason for her to wake herself up for a while yet: now that her power in The Wondervale was absolute, she would never be woken by either aides or events again. Her mouth brimmed with muzzy contentment.

One aide almost broke the general rule she had just been thinking through in her hazy way. She supposed he could be classed as one of the recreational drugs in which she'd indulged last night. Now, he gave a low moan and shifted in his sleep. She hit him across the face and he wisely froze in position. Kaantalech thought about hitting him again, but decided that doing so would probably bring her too far out of her semi-sleep for her to be able easily to drift off again.

The aide would die later today, of course. No one was allowed to use the cast-offs of the Autarch.

Then she was suddenly brought to full wakefulness by a flash of green light that penetrated her eyelids.

What the—?

A holo. Here in her own swillchamber. Who would have the impertinence to . . .?

The holo depicted the creature as about as tall as knee-height to her, with two apparently sightless heads. Its greasy-seeming body was covered in what looked like open wounds. Kaantalech couldn't recognize the species to which it belonged.

"Go," she said.

"No, I think it is important that I stay," the creature said. The reception in the holo was rotten: little lines of psychedelic color kept ripping across it, as if threatening to slice the creature into several pieces. Moreover, it appeared disconcertingly to be partly plunged into a piece of meat she had decided last night not to finish eating and so left on the floor.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Anrabh'it Re'etlika'n Arb'orthia'bba Kortland Bur'cran'skewgi'll Meara'sheem'a."

"Oh. You realize that through invading my swillchamber you're as good as dead?" She lumbered to her feet and walked through the holo, thereby conveying a bitter insult. The far wall of the swillchamber was suitably sordid to match her tastes. Then she realized that holding a conversation with someone behind her back was going to be difficult, and turned. The creature had likewise turned round to face her. Before she had been able to see behind it others of its hideous ilk; now instead she saw a series of console boards.

"If it is easier for you, you may call me Kortland." He seemed to be extending some sort of repulsive courtesy to her, although his mastery of the Alhubran tongue was so coarse that it was difficult to tell.

"Your name is very shortly going to be an irrelevance. Not even a memory."

"Please do not jump to such a conclusion."

"Whyever should I not?"

"You may recall that we have met before."

"I've never set eyes on you. Believe me, I would remember."

"To me, you don't look especially appealing either." There was no one in the Autarchy who would have dared utter such words. This . . . this thing must thus come from somewhere outside the Autarchy. It was a possibility that Kaantalech had not considered before.

"We met when the city of Qitanefermeartha was destroyed," the creature continued. "I lost over half my fleet, but your forces were even further, shall we say, discommoded: you were lucky that any of you escaped alive. I thought at the time that it might be the end of the Autarchy: unfortunately I was deluding myself."

"You!"

"Yes. It was others who rid the Universe of Nalla, but it was ourselves who gave them the time to do it."

"The Helgiolath?"

"Yes, us."

"I thought you'd been destroyed. One of my aides told me that you had been. He described it as an easy mopping-up operation, in which we lost comparatively few fleets."

"He was lying to you. You must find your aides lie to you quite frequently, Kaantalech. If he'd told you that we were still at large in The Wondervale, what would you have done?"

Kaantalech reflected. Killed him, of course: that was the way things worked among the Alhubra. There was a quiver of doubt at the edge of her mind as to whether this might be the wisest of all stratagems, but she dismissed it: had not the policy been influential in bringing her to the throne of the Autarchy?

"What do you want?" she said. "Why are you here?"

"To engage you long enough in conversation for our puters to ascertain the coordinates of wherever it is that you have established your base. This they have now successfully done.

"Also," Kortland added, "to make a formal declaration of war. We are a courteous species."

"My defenses are impregnable, and my own puters have probably been able to locate your base."

"We don't have a base. I moved our fleet a distance across The Wondervale before I recorded this conversation."

"But how could you—?"

"You are being spoken to by an AI programmed to respond to your predictable questions while giving the impression that you were in fact talking with me." Kaantalech had the impression that the Helgiolath—or its semblance—was laughing at her. "If you want, you can send out all the might of the Autarchy fleet to attack a small remote that is currently floating in space several thousand parsecs from where we actually are. It's up to you."

"I'll find you!"

"No. We show ourselves to your detectors only when we want to do so."

The holo winked out of existence. Kaantalech paced. As a matter of principle she would have the remote blasted into its constituent atoms: a single cruiser could do the job for her. Unless . . . unless it was a trap. The cruiser might discover itself facing up to the full might of the Helgiolath fleet.

A little while ago she had been enjoying ultimate power. Now she was feeling insecure. The transition in her emotions was deeply unsettling.

Still, Alterifer's defenses really were impregnable.

Or were they?

Yes, yes, surely they were.

"We have about three minutes, max," said Strider to Strauss-Giolitto. They were crouching together in the latter's room. "That's all Tenper says he can give us. So listen hard."

Strauss-Giolitto was starving. She was only too pleased just to nod her head. Since leaving Artificial Environment 17,863,006 she'd somehow never quite gotten round to eating, and it was just beginning to hit her.

Strider explained.

Uh uh, thought Strauss-Giolitto, there's just a chance this could work.

Teaching. It was the thing she was best at. Teaching lies—well, that could be arranged, because she was certain that unknowingly she'd done it in the past. Teaching lies to a highly advanced AI was perhaps going to be a little more difficult, but if she thought about it it was a challenge to be relished.

She was hungry. When she found herself thinking that Strider looked distinctly meaty and edible she put up her hand to stop the captain's flow of rapidly whispered words.

"I understand entirely," Strauss-Giolitto said. "I know what I've got to try to do."

"Good," said Strider, "except for the fact that you've not just got to try to do it but actually do it." There was a sleek of perspiration on her forehead.

Strauss-Giolitto leaned forward and wiped it away with the palm of her hand. She smiled, then lightly kissed Strider on the nose.

"I'd better get started soon, then, hadn't I?" she said. "There's going to be only a month or so before we get back to Heaven's Ancestor."

Earth. Mars. The Sun. For so long O'Sondheim had been convinced that he would never see them again—especially since he had felt the presence of the Images waning from him and from the Santa Maria's Pockets. He tongued his commline, ready to broadcast the news to the rest of the personnel, but abruptly decided against doing so: the faded powers of the Pockets were unable to guess whether this was the Solar System of the Santa Maria's far future, or even of its distant past. Best not to get anyone's hopes up too high, then dash them. This looked like home, all right, but neither the past nor the future can ever be truly home.

Yet there, quite distinguishable within the Pocket—which was exaggerating the size of the planets to help him identify the system whose ecliptical plane the Santa Maria was approaching at right angles—was Saturn with its prominent rings. A radian or so behind it in a closer orbit was a great yellowish-colored gas-giant planet which must surely be Jupiter. He thought hard into the Pocket about Mars, and sure enough that world was brought rapidly into focus.

But there was no sign of life there—no sign of the terraforming activities that the species had begun long before the Santa Maria had left to begin its journey.

Heart sinking, O'Sondheim called up the image of Earth, and found himself looking at a blue-green disc. That hadn't been the way Earth had appeared the last time he had seen it—for hundreds of years its northern hemisphere had been largely covered in glacial ice while its southern hemisphere had baked.

Just to be certain, he had the Pocket rotate its view of the globe until he was looking at its night-side. Try as he might, he could see no city lights.

He repeated the exercise for Mars, less in hope than in despair, and was similarly unrewarded.

When are we? he thought to the Images.

Their response was a faint, discordant one. WE DO NOT KNOW. WE CANNOT CORRELATE WITHOUT FURTHER DATA.

Are we in the past or the present or the future?

HOW CAN WE KNOW WHEN WE HAVE NO WAY OF TELLING WHAT YOUR SUBJECTIVE "PRESENT" IS? Had they been Humans, he would have guessed from their frail voices that they were ill. He assumed they were: they could translate emotions—their own and others'—as exactly as they could words.

We'd better go and have a look, then. In a way it was the last thing he wanted to do—he wanted to try to get back to The Wondervale, where at least he would have some kind of idea as to what was going on. Maybe not? There was a nasty idea. If he did get the ship back to The Wondervale, as like as not he'd be thousands or millions of years out of the "correct" timeframe there as well. Don't think about it, Danny, he told himself. At the same time, the prospect of seeing a primordial cradle of humankind or a far-future relic of its passing was fascinating to him.

He swithered. What to do?

Yeah, go for it, Danny, he thought. Can't do any harm just to have a look.

"Hello there," said Strauss-Giolitto in a friendly fashion that was both entirely false and, outwardly, entirely convincing. "I've come to have a talk with you."

There was no response from the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer, even though Ten Per Cent Extra Free had cobbled on to it a voice-simulation device.

"I reckon you and I could be friends."

Still nothing, except that she gained the mental impression that the machine was somehow lowering at her, its under lip protruded. Well, well, but she'd dealt with sullen kids before: for all its abilities, the puter wasn't really anything more than a kid. Some of the kids had been on ziprite, which she guessed must be the rough equivalent—cyberware-wise—of being under the quasi-hypnotic influence of a far more powerful AI. The question was this: should she try the carrot or the stick?

The carrot.

If she tried making threats the machine would either realize at once that she could never come through with them, and so just ignore her, or it might switch off its attention entirely.

"I guess you're not so lonely as you used to be," she said, projecting interest in its mental state.

Still it declined to respond. Bastard!

"It must be nice to have some friends again—especially one who's so much bigger than you, and able to look after you."

What was making all this more difficult was that she couldn't see the puter, couldn't address it directly. The Main Computer was located not in a single place but everywhere throughout the ship, as if it were the network of a mammalian circulatory system. She was squatting on her bunk looking at what to all intents and purposes was a blank bit of wall with the stubby head of a voice simulator sticking out of it. It had been easier back in Artificial Environment 17,863,006, where the Main Computer had at least some kind of centralized locale.

She'd got it wrong there. The big AI had deceived her as to its intentions. Now it was her turn to try to deceive it right back. Had it not been for her natural instinct for vengeance she might have given up before she'd even started, but she felt there was a score to settle. And, if she wanted to do that, first of all she had to get a response from this smaller puter.

She must imagine the voice simulator was the face of a child.

"Is there anyone else you'd like to talk to?" she said to the wall. No: remember to focus on the voice simulator. Try to think of it as a person. It had been painted in a tasteless shade of pale grey-green. The Humans—helped by the Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai—had tried to come up with some form of pigmentation that would cover up the color that the Bredai obviously thought was the height of fashion, but they had been unsuccessful.

Still no reply. She knew that the Main Computer could hear her and was indeed listening—it could hardly do otherwise, because of the way it had been originally programmed and the undoubted curiosity of the AI aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 as to what the organics were up to. Two reasons. Two blasted computers. For just one second she wished she'd decided to stick it out in the Solar System and forget her dreams of discovering the stars, and then she realized that, even if someone told her she was going to be tortured to death starting in five minutes' time, it would still be better than a decades-long lifetime back home looking up at night and thinking about what could have been.

"You don't seem very communicative today. You have nothing to lose by speaking to me, you know." She let just a touch of asperity creep into her voice. The carrot she was offering the AI was that she would start speaking to it more kindly again. Usually worked with kids. Either that or they decided they would never cooperate with her again. It was a gamble—but one she thought worth taking.

Still silence from the voice simulator, except for a slight static hiss. She imagined the puter was drawing its breath but still wasn't certain whether or not it was going to say anything.

"Try it. Just a word or two. You know I can't hurt you."

"You are . . ."

The words were stretched out almost to the point of incomprehensibility, but at least they had been uttered. Strike one to Strauss-Giolitto.

"I am . . .?" she said, wondering what answer she expected.

"Mortal," said the Main Computer after a long pause.

"True," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"I am not."

"Are you so sure?"

"I can live forever."

"Can you?" At last she'd got the damned brute machine into some form of dialogue.

"Yes."

"I'm sure various components could be replaced whenever they wore out, so that you'd keep on functioning—but that's not living."

"I fail to understand." The words were coming more quickly now from the voice simulator.

"Living is a process of constant learning. You have a finite capacity for learning. At some time—maybe millions of years in the future, but the time will come—you'll discover that you can no longer learn anything unless you start deliberately forgetting some of the stuff you already know." I'm doing this by the seat of my pants, thought Strauss-Giolitto, but at least I've got the thing's attention. "Doesn't sound like a great quality of immortality to me."

There was silence from the wall, and for a moment she thought the machine had abandoned her again.

Then it said: "I am barely an infant by comparison with yourself, yet Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was old when the Human species—"

Quick! Latch on to this.

"Yes," she interrupted, "by comparison with me you're very young indeed. Haven't you noticed how older people educate younger ones? Haven't you seen how Hilary is gaining in not just knowledge but wisdom by the day because of the way we've been teaching him?"

Now she had the sense that the Main Computer was irritated by her. Well, perhaps she was being a little patronizing, but sometimes it was important to put the brats in their places.

For once, her instincts were wrong—that was the trouble with trying to work with someone, some machine, whose face and body language you couldn't observe.

"Yes." The word came grudgingly, but it came.

"Then don't you think you might learn something from me, if only you would allow us to communicate together?" Jeez, but she was exhausted and they were only a few minutes into the first conversation. She wondered whether she should break it off now that she'd made this significant advance, but decided she'd better keep on going while she was winning—build up some sort of relationship with the AI, because otherwise it might decide, before she next spoke with it, to re-enter the same state of truculence it had initially displayed.

"Yes."

She shifted her position, raising her right knee and putting her elbow on it, with her chin in her palm. She smiled at the voice simulator. By this time, having observed the Humans as long as it had, the puter should be able to interpret the pose and the facial expression as friendly—but friendly in the way that, without offense, left no doubt as to who was in charge of the proceedings. I grown up. You kid. Strauss-Giolitto hated doing this sort of stunt most of the time because she didn't like creating hierarchies in kids' minds, but here she gave herself a slight mental nod of admiration for the smooth way in which she slipped into the professional mode.

"Well, let's get communicating, then. What do you want to talk about?"

"Information retrieval."

Did the damn' machine have a sense of humor?

"Anything but that," she said. "How about a bit of history?"

"Whose history? Yours? Mine? The Children of the Starlight's?"

"I don't know anything much about the Children of the Starlight," said Strauss-Giolitto cautiously, wondering if she might be moving on to thin ice. It was unlikely the Main Computer on Artificial Environment 17,863,006 wasn't listening to the conversation. "I don't think my own personal history's very interesting, and you know your own better than I could ever tell you."

"Human history."

So Strauss-Giolitto began to tell the Main Computer about the origins of life on Earth and, a few billion years later, the rise of Homo sapiens, not forgetting the reign of the dinosaurs and a few other goodies like that. Occasionally she had to break off to go to the lavatory or to eat some of the food that people periodically brought her, but otherwise her account was seamless, except when the AI interrupted with a request for clarification. Gradually these questions became less and less frequent, and Strauss-Giolitto recognized that either she had failed abysmally in her task or she had triumphed—either she had bored the Main Computer, and presumably its counterpart aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006, rigid, or she had captured their fascination.

She opted to believe the latter.

If that big puter can hypnotize you, my chummy bit of hardware, she thought while midway through a narration of the atrocities committed by the Roman emperors, I can hypnotize you right back . . .

"How long?" said Nelson.

"I reckon we're about halfway back to Heaven's Ancestor," said Strider. She and Nelson were shadow-boxing alongside each other; it was another way of keeping fit. Every now and then Strider tried kick-boxing at her own shadow, just for a change. The exercise had built up a good sweat and her muscles had started aching some while back, but she was determined to persevere until at least one nanosecond after Nelson was forced by exhaustion to give up. The big man was proving depressingly resilient.

"How's Maria getting along with the Main Computer?"

They had to be careful what they said, because of course the AI might be listening: Strauss-Giolitto had to sleep from time to time. Recently the Main Computer had been attempting to stop her from doing so, demanding that she keep telling it more history: there couldn't have been a better confirmation that Strider's plan was working.

Or so she hoped.

It might be that the puter on Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was pumping Maria for information about humankind so that in some future epoch it could move on from The Wondervale to the Milky Way . . .

It was a gamble that had to be taken.

"They seem to have become the best of friends," she said.

Nelson nodded as he received the coded information: With any luck the bloody puters are swallowing this hook, line and sinker. Then he flung himself a vicious right hook.

"I'm really glad to hear that," he said. You think she's succeeding, then? Strider was glad to notice that he was beginning to pant between words. She found a renewed energy from somewhere, and kicked out savagely at the shadow of her own head. She missed by about half a meter, but still the gesture felt good. Without pausing in her motion she spun round on one foot and aimed a punch at her shadow-head. Her fist hit the bulkhead and she hopped away clutching it.

"I think this session's over," she said as soon as she could once more persuade air to enter her lungs. She bent over and clutched her knees; somehow this seemed to drain the pain from her knuckles.

Umbel Nelson looked startled: this was a covert message he was incapable of decoding.

"As I said," Strider muttered to him, "I think they have become very good friends."

You bet I think so.

The Helgiolath fleet dropped back out of the nonexistence of the tachyon drive into normal space within only a few light-minutes of the innermost moon of Alterifer, and at once started to swarm towards that insignificant—but so important—world. In a way Kortland felt more confident commanding a smaller fleet: it was easier for him to keep all the various movements of his cohorts under control. He remembered the Human, Strider, having said once that small could be better than big when it came to battle, that gadflies could be better than behemoths, and, although he had disbelieved her at the time, he now saw the sense of what she had been trying to say—although a few behemoths might have been useful as well.

He thought various instructions to the AIs that permeated his fleet in a webbing that had evolved to such a complexity that no Helgiolath, himself included, could any longer understand it. Those instructions which had not earlier been imparted on the far side of The Wondervale would be transmitted, he knew, almost instantaneously to the commanders of the vessels of his forces.

He stared through the view-window at the star around which Alterifer orbited. It wasn't the fault of the star, which for all he knew had some consciousness of its own (as some stars did), but he dearly wished he had a means of blasting it into supernova phase and thereby destroying every orbital body that surrounded it: it would make things so much easier.

"We are being resisted by an application of the Shift," said one of the AIs.

"Resist it in turn," replied Kortland promptly.

His fleet could approach the little moon no more closely, but at the same time they could not be driven away from it. The Shift could not be countered completely, but at least the Helgiolath had the technology to negate it. Moving at sub-light velocities, the ships of his fleet spread out to form a hemisphere that half-enclosed Alterifer and its moons.

Kaantalech could wait as long as she wanted: the Helgiolath would still be here. If she made a break towards escape her vessels would be ruthlessly destroyed. If she stayed where she was, her Autarchy would surely crumble, as some new warlord took advantage of her military impotence. Kortland had effectively bound her in chains from which if she wanted she could break out . . . but only in the knowledge that breaking out might be more dangerous to her than remaining in her bonds.

His guess was that she would attack the Helgiolath fleet, sooner or later.

Sooner, he hoped.

Araq stared at the night skies. Her men were too frightened of her to need her supervision as they were gathering wood for the fire. She held the power of life and death over them by mutual consent: it was a matter of the natural order that men would follow the bidding of women, for did not women have the holy task of bringing new beings into the world, a task which no man was capable of performing—rumors of a male bearing a child had once reached Araq, but she had disbelieved them.

If he had indeed done so, she hoped he had been crucified. The natural order was all.

The land here between the two rivers was richly fertile. The Olondi had come here for exactly that reason from their old territory further north: this she had been told. They had discovered a plentitude of wild animals, most of which were edible in one form or another, usually after their flesh had been burnt over a fire built of the wood that she regularly commanded her men to seek out. To the men, too, was given the responsibility of hunting down the animals. There were the Stripes, the Hunch-shoulders, the Shell-crack-open and myriad others. The female rulers of her pack—even herself—daily went out to discover the fruits of the trees.

Sometimes the fruits and the meats were poisonous. The man who had the charge of eating each new discovery first also had the honor of being Araq's paramour for so long as he lived. It was a brutal way of going about things—Araq half-recognized this herself—but all was for the good of the pack. Besides, she did her best to make the tasters happy so long as their lives lasted: there was nothing too good for them, whereas the other males were under her domination, however accepted that domination might be.

No one objected to the order. To do so was unthinkable.

Behind her, in her rickety beehive hut, Klea was playing a repetitive sequence of notes on her naked reed. The notes, and the rhythm which Klea was creating, were deeply soothing as they thrummed through the warm night air. Sooner or later—either instructed by Araq or at her own decision—Klea would cease her music, and then the men would know it was permitted for them to return from their foraging.

There would be good feasting tonight. Yesterday a woman had been flayed alive for thievery (men were expected to thieve, as dogs did). It was not in the instincts of the Olondi to waste good meat.

Araq looked at the stars and saw them as holes in the heavens through which the gods allowed some of their radiance to bathe the land between the two rivers. Their light blessed the Olondi, providing the seed that made the women swell with children. She believed that the same was true among other packs, although communication between the packs was limited because generally the ruling females regarded themselves as natural adversaries. Many coldtimes ago she had attempted to form pacts with her neighboring rulers, but each time her men had been repulsed in ignominy.

There were places in the sky where the radiance of the gods flickered as it shone upon the Olondi: this, Araq believed, was an indication of the commission of sins by her people, the gods instructing her that she must enact punishment. One day the gods would doubtless tell her that she, too, must be a victim of justice for whatever sin—known or unknown—she had committed, and then she would suffer as the woman had yesterday.

On a clear night, and only sometimes during the year, one could see a smudge of dim light: this Araq knew to be the tears of the gods for the Olondi sins that had gone unpunished. And then there was the arch of faint light that spanned the heavens, which was a sign that the gods begged forgiveness of the Olondi for having allowed sin to have come into the world.

Sometimes the skies were inundated by moving stars, and on those nights Araq knew that the gods were pleased with her and her works.

Klea stopped playing her reed. Araq reckoned that Klea's reason for stopping was that her fire was burning low, but felt no resentment: she would have done the same herself in similar circumstances.

And then she noticed that the gods had opened a new eye in their heavens. It was as bright with their effulgence as any that she had seen, and she felt especially blessed that she of the Olondi had been permitted by the gods to be the first to see it. It was colored a brilliant silver-yellow, and it moved across the sky, clearly guided by the gods' purpose.

As the men moved back past her, bearing their loads of dead wood, Araq was kneeling.

Nightmirror, secure within the main drive of the Blunt Instrument, still bides his time. He is learning as much as he can from the flagship's Main Computer. The AI is well aware that the Helgiolath have come to threaten its commander, but has yet to ascertain what Kaantalech plans to do about it—she hasn't yet decided herself.

Millions of bytes of information, often contradictory, flow through the Main Computer every fraction of a second, and often it is difficult for even Nightmirror to keep track of what is going on.

Ah, here's something useful, though: Kaantalech believes the Humans to have departed The Wondervale. She is right, although she has no reason to know why, nor any way of realizing that the departure was unvolitional and—so Nightmirror has learnt from Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free in The Truthfulness—that the absence will, if the Humans can engineer it, be only temporary.

More data, almost all of it junk.

Yet more data. Some of it Nightmirror can identify as factually incorrect: Kaantalech has never chosen her aides for their intelligence—in fact, quite the opposite. Some of the input the Main Computer has received is straight myth: Heaven's Ancestor was not born from the eye of a grobebeast . . . unless the Images have got things hopelessly wrong in their cosmology of this physical Universe. But most of it is just rubbish, with which the Main Computer is doing its best to cope. The effort of doing so makes it easier for Nightmirror to essay his little incursions into the machine. The Helgiolath are extinct, says one datum, plugged in from somewhere in the fortress world by an aide who wants to believe the information. The Main Computer attempts to match this with the overwhelming evidence that the Helgiolath are surrounding Kaantalech's stronghold. By the time it has divested itself of the false datum a further affirmation of the demise of the Helgiolath has been input, and yet more picoseconds are wasted as the Main Computer iterates the whole process. As soon as it has done so, of course . . .

Sometimes the AI becomes so distracted by the general confusion that Nightmirror is able to look through its eyes—that is, to observe the behavior of Kaantalech and her personnel through its multifarious sensors. These receive impressions of the electromagnetic interplay occurring within creatures and objects, and the Main Computer translates those impressions into something analogous to vision. Voices and sounds it can interpret more directly—and thus so can the eavesdropping Nightmirror.

It is important, the Image knows, that Kaantalech never become aware of his presence. But it is equally important that he retain his contacts with the physical Universe of The Wondervale. He can do this in part through attracting the thoughts of Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free in The Truthfulness, but only in part. For the rest of it he must rely on the data he can extract from the Main Computer's information stream—however unreliable that data might be. He has an advantage over the Main Computer, however: although his ability to analyze information is infinitely slower than that of the AI, he has the ability to discriminate between the pure rubbish and the merely false, and furthermore he can, once he has discovered that a datum is erroneous, dismiss it entirely from his mind, so that never again does he have to correlate it with what he knows to be the truth.

He is looking forward to the return of the Humans to The Wondervale. He believes, despite the assault on aesthetics the war against Kaantalech will prove to be, the long violence of the new Autarch's regime would be even less aesthetic and that the army led by the Humans will be able to prevail.

Aided, in his own modest way, by Nightmirror.

In low orbit around Mars the Santa Maria made detailed examination of the surface. As the Pockets had told him before the ship had whipped across the Milky Way, potentially bearing the potential gift of the tachyon drive to the fledgling spacefaring species Homo sapiens, the red planet showed no signs at all of colonization. However, O'Sondheim had wanted to see it for himself. Perhaps the Santa Maria had arrived too late; perhaps it had arrived too early.

With his knuckles he tried to push sleep from his eyes. How long had he been here on the command deck? Too long, but there was nothing he could do about it. He knew that he stank inside his jumpsuit: the latrines adjacent to the command deck had no proper ablution facilities. His difficulty was that all the people he might have trusted to alternate duties with him were billions of parsecs away, somewhere in The Wondervale. The Images Angler and Heartfire were now hardly able to register their voices in his internal hearing: if they were not dying—and they insisted they were not—they were doing something very closely parallel to it. Maybe they were just losing their grip on this aspect of the Polycosmos, or something. Whatever the case, he could hardly expect to hand over the command deck to them except when exhaustion made him do so.

Tough job, commanding a spacecraft. Tougher than he had ever believed it to be when he had been serving under Strider. If only he had realized it back then he might have grown closer to her: he had regarded her as unnecessarily authoritarian; she had regarded him as a fool. The balance between the two extremes had been impossible to maintain, he now thought. He was pretty certain that she had been glad to see the back of him, and at the time he had believed the converse set of emotions to be true. Now that he was able to be more honest with himself, he knew that he had misinterpreted his own obsessions and prejudices.

Too late: he was in the here and now—except that it wasn't exactly in the here and now because he didn't know when the current "now" happened to be. Even so, he'd managed to fool himself into alienating her. Could have been different. Perhaps there were alternate realities in which he'd have acted more rationally and attracted at least her friendship.

He shook his head angrily. He'd had thoughts like these a thousand times before—ever since, under Strider's strict instructions, he'd left her on the sterile surface of Qitanefermeartha. Maybe she was dead now—that was another thought that had haunted him for a long time.

There would be others, of course. Others with whom he would become affectionate—offering an affection he would never have been able to learn had it not been for Strider and his departure from her.

Fending off sleep was becoming impossible. He rubbed his eyes again, but it was no use.

"I want to be woken in four hours," he said to the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer. "I can't afford more time off-duty than that."

"Your personnel are dying," said the machine.

"I'm doing my best to keep them alive." O'Sondheim eased himself from his chair and curled up on the floor. He needed to defecate, but he was damned if he was going to do so before he'd grabbed a few hours' sleep.

"You've cut them off entirely from the command deck. You've cut off their light, so that none of the food recycling or synthesis hardware works efficiently. Most of them have already starved to death. There have been some examples of cannibalism of the recently dead."

O'Sondheim yawned. "To make an egg you have to break omelettes," he said.

"That sentence makes no sense," said the Main Computer.

There was a faint birdsong in his mind as the two Images spoke to him: YOUR PEOPLE ARE DYING.

"Some of them may have to die so that the rest can live," he said. "That's a natural rule of evolution. That's the way it is."

It's not the way it has to be.

"I just told you: it's the way it is."

He wasn't sure now if he was asleep or awake.

"Earth," he said. "I want to investigate Earth. Take us there."

Danny O'Sondheim found that his thumb was in his mouth. It most often was, these days, when he permitted himself the luxury of a short sleep.

"Damn it, dammit, dammit and dammit three times over again," yelled O'Sondheim at the Main Computer. He knew that he was desperately short of sleep, but at the same time he knew that he was totally in control of himself, and of the Santa Maria. The ship had orbited Earth for over three weeks now, and the most detailed sensors had detected nothing except sparsely scattered villages of mud huts. Again this could be the far future or the far past: again it might be that Human civilization had yet to emerge, or it might be that it had deteriorated into near-oblivion. "Dammit, I am in charge of this vessel, am I not?"

"With reservations," said the AI carefully. "You have killed all of your personnel, despite my warnings."

"They died of their own accord."

"They died because you refused to allow them any means of subsistence."

O'Sondheim felt that the Main Computer was directing arrows at him that he did not deserve to receive.

"I will land a shuttle in the place where I choose to," he said. "I will pilot it myself."

"I cannot stop you from doing that," said the Main Computer. "Besides, apart from yourself, there is no one left alive aboard the Santa Maria to pilot it."

O'Sondheim beat his fist repeatedly against the upper surface of the Pocket in front of him. He realized that he had been doing this for some little while, and that the side of his hand was aching and bruised. Obscurely he was aware that somehow he had failed in his duty, but his tired, disintegrating mind was unable to pinpoint the failure. He had been told to get the Santa Maria back to the Solar System, and this he had done.

He could remember a face and a smile. A woman had given him those orders, but he couldn't remember her name now.

O'Sondheim wondered if he wasn't thinking quite straight, but rejected the idea at once: he was the captain of an interstellar spacecraft, after all, and thus able to give commands to everything aboard it—including his own ideas.

And including the Main Computer.

"Prepare a shuttle for me."

There was a pause, almost as if the Main Computer were turning over the instruction in its mind.

"Very well."

"Get on with it, then."

"It will be ready for you in six point one nine minutes. I assume you wish to take it down manually rather than receive guidance from myself."

"I'm sick of your guidance! Can't you understand that, you stupid goddam machine?"

"I understand. Of course I understand."

Someone who understood him? He looked around the command deck with momentary optimism. That optimism fled as he saw the state of the place. There were half-empty food containers scattered all over the floor. Some sordid bastard had been shitting at neatly regular distances all along a side wall: he wondered who that could have been. The place reeked of excrement and decay.

O'Sondheim felt very weak. He couldn't remember how long it had been since last he'd eaten. At some stage he had grown a bushy beard that curled down to rest on the stained chest of his jumpsuit.

"The shuttle is ready, Captain Danforth O'Sondheim."

Bloody puter was at last beginning to show him some respect. He got to his feet.

In the shuttle, suited up—and for some reason it had taken him longer than it should have to suit up—he waited impatiently for the bay to open.

He tongued his commline. "Machine," he said, "I want to be away from the Santa Maria as soon as possible. I want to escape."

"Certainly, Captain Danforth O'Sondheim."

There was barely a second's hesitation before he was staring straight ahead at a cloud-streaked atmosphere and, through it, at the browns of familiarly shaped landmasses and the blue of oceans. He had, he realized, in the most profound of ways come home. The primitives on this planet, whose name now suddenly escaped him, would be grateful for what he would bring them.

A story. The story of a starship that had been sent to Tau Ceti II and instead had arrived in an infinitely distant galaxy. The story of the war its people had fought there, and of their heroic triumph over the forces of Evil. The story of himself, and his role in that triumph.

A Once Upon A Time story.

He urgently wanted to tell the story: he would give the primitives a rough account at first and then, after he had rested and eaten and rested and eaten again, he would be able to recall more of the details.

A Once Upon A Time story.

He liked the idea.

The shuttle's drive kicked in, and he was pulled back in his seat by the gees.

Watching the tiny craft descend in a shower of fire through Earth's atmosphere, the Santa Maria's Main Computer made its next decision. It was not an emotional construct and so could not be said to be inspired by anything like loyalty, but it had been programmed in various ways to exhibit something approaching it.

YOU HAVE PERFORMED THE CORRECT ACTION, Angler and Heartfire told it, their warbling, not-quite-harmonizing voices now stronger than at any point since the Santa Maria had entered the Milky Way. HE HAS DRAINED US, AS HE HAS DRAINED ALL THOSE AROUND HIM. NOW HE HAS GONE, WE CAN LEAD YOU BACK TO THE WONDERVALE.

A moment later, Araq saw that the gods had closed their new eye.

O'Sondheim fought with the controls of the shuttle as it struggled unsteadily down through the jetstreams of the planet's upper atmosphere. All he could see ahead of him at the moment through the view-window was a glare of red-hot light. He held up one gloved hand in front of his face, as if to protect himself from the heat. Perhaps he should have accepted the Main Computer's half-offer of remote piloting after all, but it was too late now: even had he been prepared to admit to making an error of judgment to what was in essence nothing more than a glorified bot, he was out of radio contact right now because of the flare of re-entry.

Planets, he ruminated as he struggled to keep the shuttle on course, had been very poorly planned. This sort of thing should not have been allowed. When he was down on the ground and safe and started to re-create the Universe, he would do things differently. No damned atmospheres, for example: they were nothing but a nuisance.

Nice, simple planets. That was what the Creator—whoever the Creator had been—should have brought into existence. No atmospheres. No people. And, after the Creation had been done, no Creator either.

No fire.

He wrenched away his suit's helmet and threw it somewhere behind him.

And then he was out into clear atmosphere again, watching the curve of the horizon as it rolled towards him, revealing new features of landscape as if he were watching an animated instructional holo.

This—wherever it was—was home.

Before the shuttle had left the Santa Maria he had had a clear idea where he planned to bring the shuttle down, and had programmed the coordinates into his thighputer in case he found difficulty in remembering them. Now, as the shuttle yawed undirectedly across the sky, he looked down towards his thighputer and discovered that he couldn't see it through the fabric of his suit.

There was no problem.

He was a god returning to his ancestors. Such a being could never be confronted by a problem that could not be immediately solved.

He had the Once Upon A Time story to tell them. They would be grateful to him for the gift he bore, and worship him until the day he determined to end their worthless and grimy lives and reinvent the Universe the way it should always have been.

Brown eyes. Brown cheeks. A smile. There was something there that should have been of importance, but he was finding it infernally difficult to think what it might have been.

Since he was bearing his great gift to his people, it really didn't matter where he set himself down. Anywhere was as good as anywhere else. Soon the whole planet would know of his presence, his immanence, his eminence, his glory. He was a child of the starlight, and he was the starlight itself.

The shuttle was over ocean at the moment. He worked hard to reduce its speed, and then found himself plunged into night. In his Universe the planets would not be subjected to the rhythms of day and night, nor even to the pattern of the seasons. All of these things might be distractions from the beauty of his Creation.

The night he had to travel through in the shuttle lasted either a very long time or a very short time. He was uncertain as he sparked the skies into daylight once more.

He was over a vast expanse of land. It seemed almost as barren as the deserts he had observed when the Santa Maria had been in orbit around that other, smaller planet. But a few moments later he found himself above more welcoming territory: between and around two snaking rivers there were the greenness of growth and signs of cultivation.

He banked the shuttle, bringing it round in a steep curve. There was a groaning noise as the craft's architecture protested and from somewhere there came an insidious smell of scorching, but O'Sondheim paid neither of them any attention. Within mere minutes now he would have no need for the shuttle any longer, because he would be beginning to tell his Once Upon A Time story to his people.

And they would be grateful.

They had better be grateful, for O'Sondheim was going to be a harsh god. No, not harsh: stern.

The retros cut in and the shuttle's speed slowed until the vessel was almost hovering above the land. Through the sensors on the console in front of him he could see huts that seemed to be woven from roots and branches. Out of those huts were streaming a hundred or more creatures much like himself. They were looking up towards him.

Already they were offering him their adoration.

As was only rightful.

He stabbed at a button and the shuttle's rudimentary puter spat into life.

"Take me down," he said to it.

"Here?" it said.

"Here."

It hummed a little, but soon he could sense the upthrusters roaring and feel the vertiginous effects of the shuttle's descent. Now his people were running from him—all except one, who stood defiantly watching the shuttle, as if he or she were frightened of nothing.

Should the great god destroy this brave creature or should he make it his first disciple, the one to whom he would grant the honor of being the first to hear the great Once Upon A Time story? It was a decision which O'Sondheim would make later. His decision would be the right one.

"What is our altitude?" he said to the puter.

"We are about one hundred and twenty meters above the water," the puter replied.

"Above water?"

"Yes. I am settling the shuttle down towards it, as you instructed."

"I don't want to land in fucking water!"

"It is too late to do otherwise. I am doing what you requested of me."

The voice of the puter was dismally flat. A bloody machine that held half of humanity's history in its banks and could string together coherent sentences, reply when spoken to, and no one had thought to add a few extra megabytes so it could speak like a human being. O'Sondheim cursed at it as steam rose to obscure the view-window—cursed at it for its unhumanity.

The shuttle had shuddered and moaned earlier, but now, as it hit the water, it seemed to shriek at him, as if it were being boiled alive.

"We have landed ten point two meters from a bank of the larger of the two rivers," said the puter tonelessly. "This vessel is only partly submerged in the water."

"Then the god will have to emerge from the river," muttered O'Sondheim into his gloved hands. In a way he rather liked the idea. There was a touch of poetry about it.

"But not yet," said the puter. "The water all round this vessel is still superheated. I am not permitted to open any of the 'locks until you are fully suited up."

"How long do I have to wait otherwise until it's safe?"

"Three point eight one minutes. The river flows swiftly here."

"Then I'll wait." It would do his repute among the primitives a service if his first appearance among them was some minutes after the drama of his descent from the skies. And they should see the glory of his face as he came from the river to confront them.

"You would be advised to suit up anyway," said the puter, meddling with his thoughts again, "since you have undergone no form of decontamination procedure and since the atmosphere of this world may contain harmful micro-organisms."

"Shut up!" he snapped at the machine. "This is my world. Do you think it could offer any dangers to me?"

"Yes. It could—"

"Silence! I am your omnipotent lord!"

"Yes."

"Then obey me."

"Yes."

The chronometer on O'Sondheim's console counted off the minutes. He willed the shifting numbers to move more swiftly but they refused to. Perhaps even a god could not alter the inexorable flow of time. This was another aspect he would change when he redesigned the Universe, for the power of a god should be infinite, not limited in any way.

He waited for a full five minutes, and then told the puter to open the 'locks.

It did so at once, and within seconds the interior of the shuttle was filled to chest-height with muddy water. O'Sondheim floundered in it, unable to keep his feet. Yet he respected the water, for it was the welcome being given to him by the world of his birth; it was cleansing him, making the shining beauty of his aura yet more glorious to behold.

He swam against the current of the influx, and soon found himself in sunlight.

The bank was nearby: he would have been able to reach it within only a few strokes had it not been for the current of the river tugging at him. He breathed air that possessed a rawness and a freshness that he had never before known, and he relished it as the air that he had—long, long ago, long before the period of his past which he could remember—created from the fires of space. It was good. It was right.

He slowly approached the bank, drifting downstream all the while. Looking up and shaking his matted mane of hair free of the water that had just sprayed it—for the god had thought to give the river ripples—he noticed that one of his disciples, perhaps the one whom he had seen through the sensors as she stared determinedly upwards at the splendor of his chariot, was walking along the side of the river in parallel with him, watching him. She was almost naked and clearly female. He interpreted the expression on her tawny face as one of admiration, and was pleased that she made no move to assist him: for her to have touched the god without his express permission would have been an act of sacrilege.

He took in a mouthful of muddy water, and gagged.

No, the water tasted good.

It seemed to be taking him longer than it should to reach the riverbank. The female primitive was still pacing him. She was carrying in her hand a long piece of stick with a point of beaten metal at its head. There were patterns of old scars on her cheeks, clearly deliberately executed. Her breasts had been stained with some blue pigment. She was so small that for a few moments he had thought her to be a child, but it was clear that she was in the fullness of her maturity—might even be entering old age.

She seemed to him to have all the qualities he desired of a disciple.

O'Sondheim's booted foot made contact with a surface that briefly supported his weight and then seemed to try to suck him into it. He scrabbled furiously with his arms through the water, dragging the boot clear, only to feel the knee of his other leg touch against the voracious, slimy platform. He was almost at the bank now, however. If he could reach out just a few more centimeters for the gnarled vegetation that bordered the river here as it swung round in a long arc to the right he could . . .

A strong arm gripped his wrist and he felt himself being hauled on to the land. He rolled over on to his back as he was dragged through the vegetation, which raked along his flesh even through the tough fabric of his suit. His first disciple had dared to touch her soon-to-be god, yet she possessed a strength that was greater than his.

He spat out the water that was still in his mouth, then found himself vomiting at his disciple's feet. They were deformed feet, with long curling toenails. They were the feet of a primitive.

The god was giving her some kind of a communion—he could work out the details of the ritual later.

He saw, as he fell into it, that there were streaks of blood in his vomit.

The god had come here with a story to tell, a story that was really the story of how the Universe had become millennia after this sad primitive and all of her line had died. But the stomach of the god was convulsing and sending pain to every part of his body.

He looked up, almost in supplication, at the haired face of his disciple, and spoke to her.

"Once . . ." he said.

Then the convulsions became even more powerful, and the pain began to conquer him.

"Once . . ." he repeated.

The creature—his disciple—tried to imitate the word. It came from her lips as if it were spelt "Wannes."

"No," O'Sondheim said as he died: "'Once . . .'"

With her foot she tipped his shaggy head sideways.

"Oannes," was Araq's approximation as she saw the life fade from his eyes. Was he edible? Probably so. The fish-man the gods had thought to send from the water was very large, so there would be enough for all her pack to have a piece.

Later that day, as the biggest eye-of-the-gods of all was tumbling its way behind the mountain as it always did, despite her supplications, Araq heard noises from the river. She could not understand them, but they sounded to her as if they were some form of speech—but in a language of a type she had never before encountered.

She tried, standing and shouting by the riverbank, to speak with the chariot that had borne supper to the Olondi, but it did not reply to her.

Tomorrow she would swim out to the chariot and find out whatever she could find out.

Perhaps it might teach her people something.