SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
EPILOG
SAILING WITH THE TIDE
Chronology of Human Species (Dreaming Vertebrates)at Galactic Center
A HUNGER FOR THE INFINITE
THE HARVESTED
THE HARVESTED
THE COLLECTED
THE COLLECTED
THE COLLECTED
Timeline of Galactic Series
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This novel is for two dreamers
who nonetheless get their numbers right:
Charles N. Brown
and
Marvin Minsky
PART ONE
Abraham’s Star
ONE
The Cap’n liked to walk the hull.
It was the only place where he could feel truly alone. Inside Argo there was always the rustle of movement, the rub of humanity kept two years in the narrow though admittedly pleasant confines of a starship.
And worse, when he was inside, someone could always interrupt him. The Family was getting better at leaving him alone in the early morning, he had to give them that. He had carefully built up a small legend about his foul temper just after he awoke, and it was beginning to pay off. Though children might still rush up to him and blurt out a question, lately there had always been an adult nearby to tug the offending youth away.
Killeen disliked using implied falsehoods—he was no more irritable in the morning than at any other time—but it was the only way he could think to get some privacy. So no one hailed him over ship’s comm when he was out here. And of course, no ship’s officer would dare pass through the lock and seek to join him.
And now there was a much better reason not to come out here. Hull-walking just made you a better target beneath the ever-watching eyes above.
Out here. Killeen had been thinking so firmly about his problems that he had, as was often the case, completely forgotten to admire the view. Or to locate their enemy escort.
His first impression, as he raised his head to let in all the sweep of light around him, was of a seething, cloud-shrouded sky. He knew this was an illusion, that this was no planetary sky at all, and that the burnished hull of the Argo was no horizon.
But the human mind persisted in the patterns learned as a child. The glowing washes of blue and pink, ivory and burnt orange, were not clouds in any normal sense. Their phosphorescence came from entire suns they had engulfed. They were not water vapor, but motley swarms of jostling atoms. They spilled forth light because they were being intolerably stimulated by the stars they blanketed.
And no sky back on Snowglade had ever crackled with the trapped energy that flashed fitfully between these clouds. Killeen watched a sprinkle of bluehot light near a large, orange blob. Its wobbly curves fattened like ribbed, bruised sausages. It coiled, clotted scintillant ridges working with snakelike torpor, and then burst into luridly tortured fragments.
Could this be the weather of the stars? Snowglade had suffered from a climate that could turn suddenly vicious, and Killeen supposed the same could be true on the unimaginably larger scale between suns. Since he didn’t understand the way planets made weather, or the complex fabric of tides and currents, air and water, it was no great leap for him to suppose some similar shadowed mystery might apply to the raging lives of stars.
Anger forked through this sky. Behind them spun the crimson disk of the Eater, a great gnawing mouth. It ate suns whole and belched hot gas. In Argo’s flight from Snowglade, which swam near the Eater, they had beaten out against streaming, infalling dust that fed the monster. Its great disk was like burnt sugar at the rim, reddening steadily toward the center. Closer in swirled crisp yellow, and nearer still a bluewhite ferocity lived, an enduring fireball.
Looking outward. Killeen could see on the grandest scale the structure his Aspects told him should be there. The entire galaxy lurked like a silvery ghost beyond the swarthy dustlanes. It, like the Eater, was a disk—but incomparably greater. Killeen had seen ancient pictures of the regions beyond the Center, a lake of stars. But that lake did not ripple and churn. Here tides of light swept the sky, as though some god had chosen Center as her final incandescent artwork. Their target star spun ahead, a mote among wrack and storm, and all their hopes now bore upon it.
And floating in this seethe, their enemy.
He squinted, failed to find it. Argo was nearing the verge of a jetblack cloud. The distant mech vehicle probably lay somewhere within the obliterating darkness there. Abraham’s Star was struggling free of the massive shroud. Soon Argo could peer through the shredding fringes of the cloud to find her planets.
A notion tugged at Killeen but he shrugged it aside, caught up in the spectacle all around him. The heavens worked with ribbed and scaly light, like luminescent beasts drowning in inky seas.
What were the chances, he wondered, that merely showing himself out here would tempt the mech vehicle to skewer him with a bolt? No one knew—which, in the paradoxical logic of leadership, was why he had to do it.
Killeen had started this hull-walking ritual a year before, at the urging of one of his principal Aspects, a truly ancient encased personality named Ling. Revered and respected, the Aspect had been given to Killeen by the Family with high attendant ceremony in Argo’s central hall. Ling was the last remaining true starship Cap’n in the Family chip inventory. The micromind had commanded a forerunner of Argo and had exciting though often unintelligible yams to tell.
