Nigel staggered. He was still here, standing beside Abraham on a grassy plain.
And he was also encased in a place where ideas flowed like amber fire around him. Concepts burned with timeless intensity, crisp and sharp and churning past. They were in a different part of his mind, a place no less immediate than the grass underfoot.
No bird here. Or was he inside the bird?
He tried to walk and his feet dragged in a molasses-dark murk. He looked down and could not see his feet.
To a kene, he realized, the territory of thought was as real and vital as a savanna, where predators and prey made their eternal dance.
Nigel said slowly, words dragging, “The clays, the ones who came first—”
—fast images of something like a muddy beehive. But no bees. Instead, crystals swarmed in the lattice walls. A slimy sheen seeped over hexagonal corners, intricate slabs. A circulatory system?
In the winking arrays order stirred, shimmered.
“—they helped make you?”
“And you earlier bio logics, of course.” The bird voice was back but Nigel could not see it. Whatever the huge voice had been before, it was speaking now through the lesser vessel of the bird. And it had only begun to unreel an argument, a history.
The bird voice said, “They clays persisted, in some sites of this galaxy. They transformed the entire crust of their worlds into integrated lattice minds.”
Nigel breathed evenly. Was he being swallowed? “So when these kenes formed—”
—sliding stacks of phosphorescence in a cold black vault without end. The realm of self-aware data. Feeding on the conceptual fodder of the mechminds. Cool and serene and still coming out of Darwin, alien, alien—
“There was an . . . affinity. The kenes united with those of lesser substrate. The clays were analog structures with digital storage. Together they conducted . . . experiments.”
Abraham asked from somewhere nearby, “It’s so smart, why’s it talk slow?”
Nigel found it surprisingly hard to speak here. “We don’t have the right words. Sentences are, well, narrow.” Like pushing an ocean through a drainpipe. With a paper cup.
The bird said hollowly, “Their/Our early synthesis gave forth the arches which frame the Galactic Center.”
Nigel remembered the colossal luminous structures, hundreds of light-years long, beautifully streaming, each a reedy light-year wide. “How did they work out?”
—gut-deep agonies, shattering conflicts, ripped strands, howling vacancies—
“Evolution is pain. We gained insight from them.”
So much for the High Church school of advanced intelligence. Abraham asked shrewdly, “That Magnetic Mind came out of it all?”
“As a devolved application. It is a useful place to dispatch beings/information no longer needed at our/its level.”
Abraham nodded, a pale shadow to Nigel’s left. “A prickly thing.”
Nigel had taken enough, for now. He needed the touch of the human. Desperately.
He studied the wrinkled old man. Taller and far younger than Nigel, in total memory store, but strangely similar. Perhaps memory was not the sole key to experience? The man had been through a lot. For the first time Nigel truly looked at Abraham and saw him as a constellation of earned seasoning, granted him the space an equal deserves. He had gotten out of the habit of doing that, he realized. He had, in his almighty manifestations, lost a certain touch. Or an uncertain one, he thought ruefully.
“Ignore all these onlookers,” he said to Abraham. “Even gods can be just backdrop, if we choose.”
Abraham grunted sour agreement. Nigel grinned. Somehow he liked this old bastard. “Tell me how it was, then?”
THREE
Hard Pursuit
You sure it didn’t pick you up?” his father asked.
“Yeasay.”
“Quath?” Killeen’s eyes swiveled to study the huge head of the many-legger. Toby never knew why he bothered to do that. Habit, maybe. The alien’s face was an array of sensors and Toby had never been able to read any expression there.
<It is the nature of electromagnetics that detection can never be ruled out.>
“Damn all,” Killeen said, “I didn’t ask for a lecture.”
<I estimate that it did not know we were there.>
“Confidence level?”
<Approximately seventy.>
Killeen nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go.”
“Now?” Toby had wanted to ease back a bit.
“No point in waiting.”
