On and on.

Year after long year, winter after winter, summer after summer. The possible arrival of the Shiva took on the overtones of ancient myth. In his mind the final confrontation became Armageddon, Ragnarok, Dies Irae, the Fimbulwinter, the Last Trumpet. It would never happen. They would never come.

Until, suddenly, they did.

Drake rose from his dark hiding place one morning, as he had emerged five hundred or a thousand times before. The rains had ended and the air was pleasantly cool. Even before his protective shell was gone, he knew there was a difference.

Not just a single, minor change, but changes everywhere.

He looked up. The late-summer sky of Lukoris was usually a smudged yellow. Today it was pristine blue, barred with a delicate herring-bone pattern of pink and white clouds. The air was clear, and in the near distance Drake could see hills. They were not vertiginous heights that rose sheer from the encircling plain, but gentle slopes dappled with light green vegetation and small copses of rough-barked trees.

There had never been trees on Lukoris. Only low-growing plants covered the endless swamp and formed dense mats on dark watery flats.

Swamp.

Then where was the feel of cool ooze?

Drake looked down. He should be seeing algal cover and swamp pads, not the short, springy grass and clumps of blue wildflowers that stretched in front of his feet. And those feet should be wide and gray and webbed, not pink and five toed.

Drake breathed deep. He smelled lavender and thyme and roses.

He looked up and saw someone walking to him across the springy carpet of grass. Her hair shone gold in the sunlight, and she moved with the old familiar grace of perfect health. She did not speak, but her red lips smiled a greeting. When she moved to embrace him he knew just where he was.

His long search was over. He was in Paradise, and the only person that he had ever needed or wanted was here with him to share it.

The mander body had been modified in ways deliberately withheld from Drake. During all his days and years on

Lukoris, a continuous report of his condition and actions had been beamed without his knowledge from the augmented memory module of his mander brain, up to the orbiting ship and thence to far-off headquarters.

When the anomalous behavior began on the surface, the copy of Drake that existed in electronic form on the ship did not pause for analysis or explanations. He did not try to send out a superluminal signal, which had failed so often with the Shiva in the past. Instead, he activated the caesura.

It had stood near the ship, prepared and waiting for this moment, for more than half a million years. Into the caesura, one after another, went ten million separate copies of every observation ever made of Lukoris, right up to the final second.

The whole ship and its copy of Drake would go into the caesura also. It was almost unbearably tempting to wait and try to learn what had happened — Drake seemed to be down there on the surface of Lukoris with Ana, miraculously returned to him.

But waiting was too dangerous. Drake in orbit had to assume that the Shiva would soon know about and be able to use anything that was left behind, just as they had used other planetary defenses against humanity. He and the ship must follow the data packets. Immediately after that the caesura itself would close.

In the milliseconds before the ship entered the caesura, Drake had an idea as to what the Shiva might be and do. There was no time to attempt another message. All he could hope was that Drake Merlin back at headquarters would draw the same conclusion.

Ten million packets of data had left the ship — moving not into space, where they might be intercepted, but out of space completely. Not even the Shiva should be able to track something through a caesura or prevent its passage.

Drake knew the odds. They had been calculated by the composites billions of years ago. There was one chance in 969,119 that any single data packet would reach its destination at headquarters. There was the same small chance that the ship and Drake himself would arrive there. In all other cases, close to certainty, Drake would vanish completely from the universe and experience death in some unpredictable way.

But ten million independent packages of information about events on Lukoris had been sent into the caesura. That changed the overall odds completely. The chance that one or more of them would reach headquarters was good: in fact, there was only a chance of one in thirty thousand that no data packet at all would make it home.

Those were acceptable odds. Certainty would have been nicer; but certainties in the universe were rare.

Drake waited, calm and surprisingly content, for the caesura to swallow up the ship and send him with it into oblivion.

Chapter 23

“There’s trouble in the wind, my boys,

There’s trouble in the wind.

Oh, it’s please to walk in front, sir,

When there’s trouble in the wind.”

At last.

After hundreds of millions of years and a hundred billion tries, Drake and his team had something to work with.

Of course, the something made little sense. The group in the War Room was puzzling over eight copies of data records, all identical, that had been delivered through the caesura.

“It’s perfectly consistent with the statistics,” Cass Leemu pointed out. “There was a ten percent chance that we’d get

exactly eight copies, but anywhere between six and fourteen is high probability. I’m afraid there’s no sign of the ship that was orbiting Lukoris.”

She did not need to say “the ship with Drake on board.”

“The statistics may make sense.” Tom Lambert was studying one of the displays. “But nothing else does. Look at this.”

The record of the final minutes on Lukoris existed in two forms. One of them showed events as seen by the sensors scattered around the surface. The other was Drake’s own perception as received through the mander embodiment.

According to the surface sensors, Lukoris was much the same as it had been in the previous year; or, for that matter, the past half million. Swamps, broken by clumps of scrubby plant life, stretched away flat and dull to the horizon, where mile-high scarps of rock loomed skyward. The sky above them was the unchanging sulfurous yellow of late summer.

But Drake’s view…

“What is he seeing!” Milton said. “And what does he think he’s doing}”

They were looking through the mander’s eyes as it walked forward across a sward of healthy turf and spring flowers. Milton, who had never seen old Earth, was justifiably puzzled. But Drake, seated in the headquarters’ War Room, knew where he was. He was having trouble answering Milton, because he also guessed what was coming next.

The mander embodiment had become human in form. It was walking barefoot on the Sussex Downs, one of Drake and Ana’s favorite vacation spots. She had been standing by a hedgerow, admiring a thrush’s nest. Now she turned at Drake’s approach and smiled a greeting. Spontaneously, without a word, they embraced.

In that first ecstatic moment, Drake in the War Room forced himself to look across to the other display. The sensors showed the mander, unchanged in form, standing motionless before a foot-high bulbous plant with spiky silver leaves.

“Freeze!” Drake said urgently. And then, to the others, “You know the earlier records. Is that” — he indicated the little plant — “new to Lukoris, or to this region? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

“It appears to be new.” The others, using the power of their composites, could answer almost at once and simultaneously.

“But what is the significance?” Par Leon asked. “It is nothing but a plant.”