“They are awake now.”

“As they should be.”

“And they are dangerous. They have harmed two of our group already, and they are threatening the rest of us. I’m sure you didn’t bring our group all this way just to let the Zardalu destroy us.”

Speaker-Between did not reply at once. He began to intone in a low mumble: “Human, Cecropian, Zardalu… Human, Cecropian, Zardalu…” Then, after a few moments of silence, he said, “All are present and available. That is as it should be. The process can begin—”

“Not if it involves any of us, it can’t.” Rebka stepped forward, close enough to touch the shining surface of Speaker-Between. “Until you listen to us, and we get answers to a few major questions, we don’t do one thing.”

“That cannot be. Your involvement is… required.”

“Well, just you try to get it, without talking to us first. We won’t do it. Not a human, or a Cecropian. There’s a transportation-system entry point not far from here. We’ll use it if we have to.”

Rebka had taken a random shot, fishing for information. But Speaker-Between’s answer confirmed Darya’s guess.

“That would be most unwise,” the Interlocutor said. “Without suitable keys prior to use, no safe endpoint of travel is guaranteed. A transition would surely be fatal.”

“We’ll risk that. We won’t cooperate unless we have some answers from you.”

“I say to you, cooperation is required.” Speaker-Between was silent for a few seconds. “But I will listen, and talk if necessary, at least briefly.”

“How briefly?”

“For no more than eight of your hours.”

“We don’t have that long anyway. Let me tell you about the Zardalu, and what they’re doing.”

“I am hearing.” The flower head sighed. “Speak, if you must.”

Speaker-Between had listened to Hans Rebka’s explanation in total silence. The others interrupted only once, with Louis Nenda’s mutter of rage when Rebka came to the Zardalu treatment of Kallik.

“Very good,” the Interlocutor said when Rebka came at last to the Zardalu recent threats. “That is all very good. It has begun.”

“What has?”

“The process of selection.” Speaker-Between lifted himself through the floor, until the whole body and the horned tail were revealed to Nenda and Atvar H’sial for the first time. “The Zardalu, it seems, understand what is needed without explanation. But for the rest of you… listen carefully.”

To the Builders, it was simply The Problem. Compared with that, everything from the transformation of planets to the creation of stars was trivial. And like all problems that demanded their full concentration, this one was purely abstract.

What is the long-term future of the universe?

And tagged onto that central question, as a disturbing corollary, came the other, more personal one:

What is the purpose of the Builders, and what role will they play in the evolution of the universe?

The Builders could not answer, but they were enormously long-lived and endlessly patient. They pondered those questions for two hundred million years and at last came up with a conclusion that was worse than a question: it was a paradox.

They concluded that chaotic elements made the long-term future of the universe undecidable, in the Gödelian sense of a question that could not be answered from within the framework of the universe itself; but at the same time, undecidable or not, the future of the universe would happen. Thus, with or without the Builders, the undecidable question would finally be answered.

Faced with paradox, the Builders made a typical Builder decision. They moved inward, burrowing deep into the nature of their own consciousness. They examined mental processes and thinking structures. They discovered individual quirks of thought and habit, but still they were unable to decide: Were those individual attributes basic to The Problem, or irrelevances to it?

Again, the Builders were at an impasse. Worse than that, their inability to deal with The Problem began to produce disastrous effects on the Builders themselves. Instead of the pattern of slow evolution and development that had marked hundreds of millions of years, a rapid process of Builder devolution began. Debased forms of Builder appeared: the Phages.

It was a way to escape from an intolerable mental problem. Mindless, forgetting their own individual history, ignorant of the accomplishments of their kind, the Phages were as long-lived as their intelligent brothers. Soon they became a nuisance through the whole of the spiral arm. Wherever Builders could live, so could the omnivorous Phages. With their lack of intelligence and their sluggish reflexes, they were rarely dangerous; but they became a great irritation to the equally slow-moving Builders.

Again, the Builders took refuge in their own approach to a new difficulty.

They were no closer to a solution of The Problem, but they did not have to hurry. They would wait, moving themselves into long-term stasis and leaving their servants and constructs behind to waken them when the right time came and circumstances changed. Then they would address The Problem again, in a different epoch.

There was logic in that decision to wait; for although the Builders had been unable to solve The Problem alone, in the future they knew they might have help.

In the course of their development of the spiral arm, the Builders had seen nothing remotely like themselves; but they had noted in passing the development of other life-forms, creatures of the “little worlds,” high in heavy elements, whose genesis bore little resemblance to the Builders’ own gas-giant origins. The new ones were different…

“Different how?” That was Louis Nenda, posing a question asked of him by Atvar H’sial. It was the first interruption to the slow words of Speaker-Between.

“Short-lived.” Speaker-Between answered without a pause. “Incredibly ephemeral, yet filled with violence, irrational lusts, illogical hopes. Far from ready to be useful, and yet…”

The Builders had no difficulty with short-term projections of the future, up to ten or twenty million years. Their analytical tools were adequate to estimate rates of species development, and to predict with high accuracy that certain life-forms were on an evolutionary path leading inevitably to self-awareness, intelligence, and technology.

It was far harder to predict where such forms would arrive philosophically. Would they develop their own perspective on the purpose of the universe? Would they, one day, despite their strange origins, become suitable collaborators for the Builders themselves?

No forecasting techniques of the Builders could answer that question definitively. It was again related to The Problem, and on that question they had already broken the edge of their intelligence.

The Builders saw clearly the emergence of three particular little-world intelligences in the spiral arm. They predicted that each might have a major impact on the future. One of those species, surely, would add the new dimension to Builder thought necessary for a reexamination of The Problem. One species. But which one?

That question could not be answered until the species emergence was completed and their civilizations and philosophical underpinnings were established. Only one thing seemed clear: although all three species were very different from the Builders, the one most likely to be useful in adding new insight to The Problem would be the one who differed most from the Builders themselves.

“You still keep saying we’re so different from the Builders,” Darya said. “I can see that we have far shorter lives. And we are not yet anywhere near so advanced technologically. But those don’t seem like profound differences — time could change both of them.”