All of his team were assembled in the War Room. They were stunned to silence. The scene that Drake had followed in detail for one probe had been repeated over and over, in a thousand variations. The planets remained apparently untouched and unchanged; but no probe had been able to land.

Par Leon was in the worst shape. It confirmed Drake’s idea, that the death of a clone was perfectly real — and not only to the clone. Leon was shattered.

He had seen himself annihilated, time after time. Not one of his copies had tried to do anything about it. Each had gone fatalistically to his doom. It had been a mistake to send Leon, and Drake would not do it again.

He deliberately changed the War Room wall from its overview of newly silenced worlds to the old, white-capped seascape.

“We learned a lot from that experience.” He was brisk and businesslike. “Of course, we’ll do a full analysis of every case, but I only want Tom involved in that. The rest of you will have other assignments. Milton, we’ve been treating this as a problem just for humanity. It isn’t. Every life-form on a silenced world must be affected. I want to meet with you and review every alien life-form in the Galaxy. We may learn something about the Shiva.”

“But it was our understanding that the Shiva originated outside the Galaxy.”

The Servitor was as deferential as ever — and as steadfast. Drake realized that Milton would be a better choice than Par Leon to send on future probes. But even Milton would not be ideal. What was needed was someone who would play a long shot, someone to take a wild risk when it was justified.

Who?

Drake postponed the question.

“I think the Shiva did originate from outside the Galaxy,” he said. “But even if we don’t find out anything about the Shiva from alien life-forms, the forms themselves may prove useful. Leon, I want you to work with Milton on this.

“Melissa, we know that what we tried last time didn’t work. If we’re going to stop the Shiva spread, we have to know more about how they do it. Can their influence move through open space, or does it need planets to do it efficiently? You are going to help us answer that question. You will have the job of creating a. firebreak.” Drake was forced to use the English word. “Do you know what that is? It’s an empty region across the whole Galaxy, surrounding the segment affected by the Shiva. If they need planets, a void should slow and hinder their spread.”

Melissa’s eyes opened wide, and she shook her head dubiously. “I’ll do my best. But do you realize how big a job that will be?”

“It will be enormous. I want a quarantine zone, at least twenty light-years wide, between the edge of the affected sector and the nearest colonized world.”

“You mean you want the colonies moved.”

“I want more than that. I want the colonies moved to a safer location. But then I want space completely empty in that region. No planets, no stars. Not even dust clouds, if we can do it. I want hard vacuum and nothing else.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I don’t think so.” Drake turned to Mel Bradley. “You and Cass have been evaluating the caesuras as possible attack weapons. Do you have an idea how big an object they can handle?”

“In principle, there is no limit.” Mel had been the last addition to the team, but he was a great choice. While the others cringed at the very idea of violence, he reveled in it. “The caesuras seem to feed on their own activity,” he went on. “The more you put into them, the bigger they get.”

“Could you put a whole planet into one?”

“No!” But the hot, angry eyes were gleaming with curiosity. “Not yet, at any rate. We’re orders of magnitude away from that. Right now I can put a small asteroid into a caesura. Do you want to put a planet in? Maybe, if we keep going …”

“Work on it.”

“And you said stars, too?”

“One step at a time. When you get to the point where a caesura can handle a planet, I want to see a demonstration.”

“Mobility is going to be the other problem. We either have to create a caesura where we need it or move one around. That’s not going to be easy.”

“Nothing is going to be easy. Get Cass to help you.” Drake looked around the table. “All right, I think we’ve covered everything. Everyone has plenty to do. Let’s go do it.”

Except, of course, that they had not covered everything. Drake knew it, even if no one else did. He had ducked the most important question of all: Who was going to replace Par Leon as the on-site observer and principal actor in the next interaction with the Shiva?

He knew there would be another interaction. More than that, he expected a countless number of them, over many millennia and even many aeons, before the problem was resolved (one way or another; it might end with the Shiva taking over every world in the Galaxy. That was a resolution of sorts).

Par Leon would not do. He might learn someday to observe dispassionately, but in an emergency he would never know how to take action without direction.

The trouble was, Drake already knew the answer to his own question. It was obvious, as soon as he stated the issues clearly: Who would be willing to use weapons? Who could take a wild risk when it was justified? Who had the most to lose? Who had a motivation to survive, stronger than any of the composites?

The others were terrified when a planet became silent, but any planetary consciousness was likely to form part of a larger composite, with multiple components elsewhere. The disappearance of a planet from the communications web, or even its total annihilation, was not a total death for them. It was more like an amputation, the loss of fingers and toes — highly unpleasant and traumatic, but not fatal.

So. It had to be Drake himself. He would have to agree to something that he had so far resisted, and allow multiple copies of himself to be downloaded, shipped off anywhere that they were needed, and used in either organic or inorganic form. And he had to remain an individual, not joined to form part of a composite. He had to be aware of and afraid of death, focused on his own survival, willing to use any weapon that would allow him to live. Multiple duplication sounded like a guarantee of immortality; he recognized it as a promise of multiple deaths.

He would probably die, over and over, in many places across the Galaxy. Was there any other alternative? If there was, he was not smart enough to see it.

So it had to be Drake. He didn’t want to do it, but he would.

He would do it for the sake of Ana, and for their future together.

Chapter 19

Snark Hunt

Drake had never felt better; fit, strong, and confident. He narrowed his nostrils against the dusty wind and nodded to Milton. “Ready when you are.”

The Servitor was standing by his side. It wore the familiar shape of the wheeled sphere, topped by a whisk broom of motile wires. The wires wriggled and twisted as Milton said, “Are you sure? Do you not need more time to adapt?”

“I am adapted. Perfectly.”

“You see, it was easy for me to take on my original form. But in your case …”

Drake knew what the Servitor was getting at. If he thought hard about it, he could recognize that the Sun was a peculiar and brilliant green, two sizes too small in the sky. The landscape of the planet, Graybill, glittered in prismatic silvers and blues. At the limit of vision, the land curved upward to a hazy horizon. He seemed to be standing in a giant bowl that quaked and shivered beneath his feet, like a tough skin stretched tight over viscous jelly.

No problem. Graybill orbited far from a K-type star whose photosphere was peculiarly high in metals. The bowl effect was a result of vastly higher atmospheric pressure. In fact, if he thought about it, he could explain all the things he saw and felt — just as he knew that he inhabited a thick-legged, shorter body, and that other versions of him, thousands or millions of them, existed far, far away.