But here was the oddity: distant worlds were not affected. The Shiva influence was a local effect. If there was a way to be close enough to observe a world as it was lost, yet somehow far enough away that the observer would not be swallowed up in silence, then humanity might learn something new.

That prompted another thought: Could it be that they were not going early enough to the endangered worlds? Suppose there were long-term changes, subtle warnings of the coming of the Shiva, that Drake’s observers did not

catch because they had not lived long enough on the planet.

What sort of indicators were plausible? He couldn’t say. Ice ages, variation in length of seasons, movement of polar caps, polarity reversal of magnetic fields, earthquakes, modified physiology of individuals at the cell level, homeostatic shift — it could be any or all of them. Despite all his studies, he was not, and would never be, a scientist.

But he could think of a way to test his idea. Embody someone in a long-lived form. Make thousands of copies of him, organic or inorganic. Send a copy to each world, long before the Shiva were expected there. Ask each one to wait, observe, and prepare. Tell him to be patient. Tell him to report back any anomaly, no matter how small.

Drake reached one more conclusion. He had been thinking “him,” and it was not hard to see why. How could he ask anyone else to endure an interminable wait, especially one likely to end with final extinction?

It was not some indefinite “him.” It was Drake.

It could be Drake and only Drake. He had to be the one. He would prepare, and he would send copies of himself. He would also be at headquarters and monitor every incoming message. And one day, before the whole galaxy was silenced, perhaps the Drake-that-goes and the Drake-that-stays would learn something useful.

And one other thing must be done. A certain crucial piece of information must be withheld from any copy of Drake who descended to each planet.

He would consult Cass to find out just how to do that.

Drake splayed his feet on the marshy surface and stared up for a last sight of the spacecraft. It was difficult, not only because the ship was dwindling in apparent size, but because as it rose higher the rate of motion across the sky decreased. Drake was embodied in a native form known as a mander. Its eyes were like a frog’s eyes, good at seeing rapidly moving objects, less effective on anything that stayed in one position.

One final glimpse, and then the ship was gone. Human vision might follow it still, but Drake could not. It did not matter. He knew where it was and where it would remain, far beyond the atmosphere in a polar observation orbit.

He looked around. This planet, Lukoris, was his new home. He had better get used to it, because he was going to be here for a long time. Half a million years did not sound like much — if you said it fast. From three to five hundred thousand years were likely to elapse before the Shiva arrived. Half a million years of waiting, before this world became part of the expanding Silent Zone.

The first thing was to understand and feel at home in his own body. He had been animated less than ten minutes ago, as the ship was preparing to leave. Drake examined the mander’s physiology with a fair amount of curiosity. He was supposed to live like this, awake or dormant, for a thousand human lifetimes. According to the composites this body would never age or wear out. Even if he were to remain continuously conscious, which was not his plan, the mander would be as healthy and limber in a million years as it was that day.

How could that be? But perhaps a better question was, why not? Why did organisms age at all?

The answer had been discovered, long, long ago, and soon followed by the longevity protocols. Death by aging was a far-off anachronism. But none of that explained, in a way that Drake could understand, why a being aged, or how current science could hold off old age indefinitely.

It was like much of science: important, useful, and totally mysterious.

Drake returned to the inspection of his body. This was, according to alien specialist Milton, the closest form to human on the whole planet. It was hard to believe.

Drake examined the mander’s feet. They were large and webbed. The legs above them were long and powerfully muscled, ideal for long balanced leaps. If it swims like a frog, and jumps like a frog, and sees like a frog…

He stuck out one of his two tongues. It was short and not sticky or club ended. He had already known that, intellectually, but he wanted reassurance.

In other respects the mander body was not at all froglike. His skin was dry and soft to the touch, covered with material like feathery mole fur. His two mouths were not in his head, where the sense organs were clustered, but one on each side of the torso beneath the breathing apertures. His brain was centered between them, deep in the interior of his chest and protected by rings of bony plates. Nothing could reach it that would not kill him first.

His embodiment was not, according to Milton, the most intelligent life-form on the planet Lukoris. That position was claimed by a monstrous flying predator known as a sphexbat, a creature that bordered on self-awareness and rode the permanent thermals around Lukoris’s crags and vertical precipices, landing neither to feed nor breed. The sphexbat’s young developed within the body cavity of the parent until one day they were ejected, to fly or to fall to their deaths. Lukoris’s mutation rate was high. The survival odds for infant sphexbats were no better than 30 percent.

Drake was interested in the animals mainly because they were interested in him — manders formed one of the sphexbat’s preferred forms of food. An immortal body was immortal only against aging. It could still be killed. He, of course, could be reembodied, but death by sphexbat sounded unusually unpleasant. The sphexbats did not swoop down on their prey and carry it off, like the Earth raptors. First they made a low-level run across the surface, blowing a fine cloud of neurotoxic vapor from glands at the base of their wings. Vegetation cover was not enough protection. Any mander inhaling the fog did not die, but it felt the urge to crawl into the open and there became paralyzed. The sphexbat returning at the end of the day for its second run found the prey alive and conscious but unable to move. The victim was scooped up from the surface and consumed at leisure. The sphexbats maintained live larders on high rock ledges, and a mander — or Drake — might wait there awake and immobilized for many days.

Danger from sphexbat attack was a potential problem on the surface, but that’s not where Drake intended to spend most of his time. No one could live alone and conscious for a million years, in his own body or any other, and remain sane. Drake would mostly be at the bottom of the swamp with the other manders, ten meters down, dormant and safe from attack. His species estivated regularly.

Events on the surface would not be ignored. A network of instruments would record data until Drake’s return to the surface. That information supplemented the observations of the orbiting ship.

Drake expected to return to the surface for Lukoris’s winter, but not every time. Once every hundred or thousand years he would be above ground for a few months, to check the instruments and to conduct a planetary survey. Changes that occurred too slowly to be noticed in real time might jump out at him if he saw the planet as a series of snapshots, glimpses caught at widely separated intervals.

First, though, he needed a baseline from which to measure change. He must understand Lukoris in all its parts. He would travel around the world and observe as he had never observed before.

Drake sighed, and said to himself, Why bother? Why am I doing this?