“I’m not sure. Look for more of them.”
That analysis was also finished almost before the command was given. All of the Galaxy’s computing power was available when Drake asked for it. With such resources the problem was trivial. Using the spiky-leaved plant as a template for a matching algorithm, the global database of Lukoris was scanned and analyzed, every day of every year since observations first began.
“They’re all over the place,” Cass said. “This size or smaller. But ten years ago there were none. They’ve all sprung up in the past few years. Do you think they are real?”
“I’m sure they are. It’s the other scene that’s a false reality.” Drake hated to say that. He wanted what he had seen to be true, and he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes away from the image of Ana. “I think the plant is able to create an illusion in the mind of an intelligent being.”
“Why intelligent?” Par Leon asked.
“Imagination needs intelligence.” Drake gestured again to the first display. The mander stood motionless before the plant, while other animals wandering the swampy surface apparently took no notice. “There must be a certain minimum awareness, a level of intelligence before a mind can be made to imagine something other than what it receives through its senses.”
“Like hypnotism,” Melissa said. “The subject sees what she is told is there.”
Mel Bradley scowled. “Hypnotized by a plant ?”
“Do you have a better explanation?” Drake zoomed in on the mander. “Look at me. Cass can probably suggest a
thousand ways in which an electromagnetic signal, or a scent containing the right chemicals, could affect the functioning of the brain. Remember, the plant doesn’t change Lukoris. It just persuades the subject to see an alternate reality.”
“But what reality?” Milton sounded confused. “It surely can’t impose its own reality on someone.”
“No.” It did not surprise Drake that he knew what was happening when the others did not. His understanding was exactly proportional to his pain.
“Not its reality,” he went on. ” Your reality. It allows you to see, and to imagine that you live in, the reality that you desire beyond any other.”
He, more than anyone else in the universe, understood the seductive power of that vision. He would give anything to be that other Drake, kissing Ana in the quiet countryside. It was the siren call of the Shiva: Stay with me, and receive your heart’s desire.
Drake tried to explain that to the others, but after a while he realized it was not working. They could not know the mind of the other Drake, and it was impossible for any of them to feel what he was feeling. They were merely asking more questions.
“How does it reach the planet in the first place?” Tom Lambert said.
“I don’t know.”
“Is that it, the whole thing?” said Mel Bradley. “You think the Shiva are nothing but little plants?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the planetary defense systems failing …”
“And their spreading between the stars, between the galaxies… How?”
“And moving more slowly where we didn’t have colonies…”
“And the failure of the lost colonies to send any sort of message…”
“I don’t know.” Drake was longing to terminate this meeting, so that he could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of Ana embracing his other self — even if it was nothing but illusion, he wanted it.
“You’re missing the point,” he, continued. “This doesn’t prove that some spiky little silver plant is all there is to the Shiva. It doesn’t tell us how the Shiva spread, or why. It doesn’t say what happens to a world after they reach it. It tells us little about the Shiva themselves. But we still have a reason to celebrate. We’ve had a breakthrough. For the first time ever, we’ve been present on a planet when the Shiva took over. We’ve sent back information about what happened.
“We don’t have an end. We barely have a beginning. Here’s what we must do next. We must install organic copies of me on every planet along the front of the Shiva’s spread.”
Drake paused, realizing what he had just said. Those copies were going to disappear, every one of them. He was going to vanish, a million times over. But now there was a hope that some of the embodiments would not die. He might be transported to a personal Paradise — a dream life, but a perfect dream from which the copies might never waken.
“We also,” he went on at last, “have to put arrays of independent sensors on every planet. We must install caesuras on or near each planet, ready to operate whenever a reality shift signals that the Shiva have appeared. We must install on a ship near the caesura the equipment to produce millions of identical copies of all data, with the equipment to feed those copies into the caesura at the first sign of trouble.”
Equipment. That was one way to describe it. But the equipment would include copies of himself — and these copies, unlike the ones down on the planetary surface, were surely doomed.
“And when we’ve done all that” — Drake’s gaze, beyond his control, was drawn back to the display; it showed his other self, still holding Ana in his arms — “when we’ve done all that, and we have recorded the information from a thousand or a million or ten million worlds, maybe we’ll get what we need. Maybe we’ll find a way to fight back.”
Breakthrough.
Drake had called it that, but it was the wrong word. No torrent of information flooded in from other worlds on the path of the Shiva expansion. No sudden insight explained everything.
What came was a slow dribble of isolated bits and pieces, an image here, a paradox there; confirmation of a hypothesis, a measurement of sizes and rates and masses, calculations of galactic geometry, the cross-correlation of events from a million worlds as they were absorbed into the Silent Zone.
Drake could not perform that analysis. It was far beyond him, calling for the combined analytical power of a trillion composites. All he could do was sit at headquarters and record the disappearance of each copy of his own self. There was always the possibility that a caesura would deliver a copy of Drake back to headquarters, along with the packets of acquired data; but it never happened.
Data collection and analysis continued; the arc of the Silent Zone spread its darkness farther across the face of the Galaxy; nothing seemed to change. But one day, a day that Drake saw as no different from any of the billion that preceded it, his assistants appeared un-summoned in the villa headquarters.
“Drake, we must talk.” Milton had been appointed as the spokesman. The Servitor’s physical form was the usual one, but now Drake detected a weariness and a discomfort, a gray translucency to the presence. The tangle of wires on the whisk broom were in constant agitation.
“I’m listening.” Drake looked them over, Cass and Milton and Tom, Melissa and Par Leon and Mel Bradley. They all displayed that same uneasiness. “Bad news?”
“Yes,” Milton said. “But not what you might be thinking. Every composite in the Galaxy has been in full superluminal connection for the past few days. We finally have an integrated picture of Shiva activities. It is an inference derived from many trillions of pieces of data, but we are convinced that it is a correct one.”
“That doesn’t sound like bad news. Quite the opposite.”
“In many ways you are right; but it introduces… complications. First, let me summarize for you our understanding of the nature and actions of the Shiva. Much of this you may already know or have guessed. Some of your original conclusions were, if I may suggest it, wrong.”
Milton paused, and Drake laughed.
“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’ve been wrong more often than you can imagine.”
“But right more often than any other being in the Galaxy. Let me continue. The Shiva are living organisms, unlike any encountered before. They have four distinct phases to their life cycle. Two of those phases are capable of two different forms of reproduction. The first phase, which we will call the adult Shiva, is immobile and enormous — one full-grown specimen can measure two hundred kilometers across its base, and stretches high enough for its top to extend beyond the atmosphere of most planets. The adult is invulnerable to normal predator attack, because of its size, and also because it is protected by a second form. We will call this second form the warrior, although it acts aggressively only in defense of the adult. The warriors are one form of offspring of the adults.