The aft missile pod emptied with a roar. The thump jarred him back into his couch. Ahead, an orange ball dwindled as it knifed through blackness at the shadowy pearl beyond.

“Evers! You bastard, what are—”

“I am assuming command, as the President provided. As you can see, I have emptied the tube. Now if you would care to report the effect—”

Nigel thumbed away from that frequency.

“Snark! You reading me? Stop that missile, it’s—”

“I know.”

“Detonate it. There are sixteen megatons in that bird.” “Then I cannot.”

Something was happening to the pearl. A searing purple lance blossomed at one end.

“Good God, you must—”

“I cannot be certain of a silencing of the warhead. Detonation of such a device would kill you.”

“Kill…? NASA computed I could survive a blast from…”

“They were wrong. This close would be fatal.”

“I…”

“So I am fleeing. I will outrun it.”

Nigel peered out and found the pearl, on black velvet, the orange ball hanging in space nearby. Their relative motions were submerged by distance. From the Snark’s tail came a column of unimaginable brightness, dimming the silver glow of the Snark’s skin. The exhaust pattern was precise, carving order from the darkness that enveloped it.

“You can’t just nullify it?” Nigel said.

“Not with assurance.”

“You certainly controlled my inboard electronics well enough.”

“That was simple. The method, however, is not perfect. Apparently your technology has not realized yet the, ah, heel—”

“Achilles heel?”

“Yes. The systematic flaw in your electronics. They are unprotected.”

“Where are you going?” Nigel murmured tensely. “Outward.”

He sighted on Snark’s trajectory. The orange blossom trailed it, getting no closer. Snark’s path took it away from the moon in a steep arc. It was, he noticed, a highly energy-inefficient course. To elude the missile alone, it would have been simpler to— But then he saw that the Snark was keeping the moon always between it and Earth, so that the Deep Space Net would be at least partially blinded, and pursuit more difficult.

“You’re leaving.” It was not a question.

“I must. I exceeded my mandates when I approached so near. It was a calculated perturbation in my directives. A chance. I lost.”

“If I talked to NASA for a bit, perhaps—”

“No. I cannot err again. I have been overridden.” “You’re not free? I mean—”

“In a sense, no. And in another sense, one I could not describe to one of membrane, I am free.”

“But—damn it! You could tell us so much! You’ve been out there. Seen other stars. Tell me, please, why is it that, when we listen on the centimeter and meter bands— the radio spectrum—why don’t we hear anything? Our scientists argue that this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the cheapest part, considering that the sender must overcome the random emissions of stars and hydrogen gas. So we’ve been listening and—nothing.”

“Of course. They send me instead. I suspect…I am their way of learning what is nearby. If there is danger they inform each other. I have listened to their messages.”

“How? We haven’t heard anything.”

“To you the medium is… exotic. Particles you do not perceive.”

“You could teach us.”

“It is forbidden me.”

“Why?”

“I am not certain…I have been given specific directives. Why these directives and not others I…I have thought often about them. I make guesses. That you, for example, are the aim of my wanderings.”

“Then stay.”

“I only notify them of your presence. So they will know, I expect, that you may someday come.”

“Why not—”

“Come to study you? Too fraught with risk. Your kind is too precarious. I have seen thousands of ruined, gutted worlds. Wars, suicides, who can tell? To my makers you are a plague, the one percent of the galactic cultures that carry the seeds of chaos.”

“I don’t …”

“You are rare. My makers, you see, were machines such as myself.”

Nigel felt himself drifting in a high and hollow place, airless. He glanced out at the wheeling moon. Its riddled and wrinkled hide he saw afresh, looming strange below, craters of absurdly perfect circles that had been arranged so randomly. Nigel breathed deeply.

“The stars are…”

“Populated by the machines, descendants of the organic cultures that arose and died.”

“Computers live forever?”

“Unless a carbon-based life finds them. Machine societies cannot respond to your strange mixture of minds coupled with glands. They have no evolutionary mechanism to make them develop techniques for survival— other than by hiding.”

Nigel chuckled. “They’re cowering out there.”

“And learning. They sent me. I learned much from you, in the desert.”

“And from Alexandria,” Nigel said in a whisper. “Yes.”

“Where… where is she? You were with her in a way no one ever has been when, when she…”

“The machine civilizations—I have visited some by accident, though not the vaster complex that must have made me—have shown that disintegration of structure equals information loss.”

“I see.”

“But that is only for machines. Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go.”

Nigel felt an odd trembling in his body, a sense of compressed energies. “Universe of essences…?”

“You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you… windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…”

“The damned speak frantically.”

“No.”

“But we are damned. Compared to you.”

“By duration? Eight hundred thousand of your years— so much as I have counted—are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, colored. Mine…I scream, sometimes, in this night.”

“Good God.” He paused. The voice had shifted to a deeper bass and now seemed to echo in the cabin. “I would like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality—”

“Is a spice. A valued one.”

“Still—”

“You are not damned.”

“Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”

“What was that sound?”

“Uh, laughter.”

“I see. Spice.”

“Oh.” Nigel smiled to himself. “Is your palate so flat?” After a long moment the voice said, “I see that it might be. Each of you laughs differently—I cannot recognize or predict the pattern. Perhaps that is significant; much hides from me. I was not made for this.”

“They designed you to—”

“Listen. Report occasionally. I awake at each new star. I perform my functions. But the sum is not greater or lesser than the parts, merely different … I, I cannot say it in your words. There, there are dreams. And what I gathered in from you is mine. The flavors. Your art and the set of your minds; only I am interested in those. Essences? They did not want it; perhaps the world-minds did not need it. But I…it is for my times in darkness.”

The pearl was dwindling, drawing up unto itself.

“I wish you well out there.”

“If I functioned as my designers intended, I would not need your blessing. I would go through that night blindly. I—the part who speaks to you—am an accident.”

“So are we.”

“Not of the same oblique cast. I have received a recognition signal… but you will discover them soon enough. For the moment I see that other men will exact much from you, for this.”

Nigel smiled. “I’ve let the quail take wing. Right. They’ll lay me out, I expect.”

“They cannot rob the essences from you.”

“The experience itself, you mean? Well, no, I suppose not. It’s good-bye then?”

“I think not.”

“Oh?”

“I am versed in many… animal theologies. Some say you and I are not accidents and that we shall meet again in different light. You are membrance. Perhaps we are all mathematics, everything is, and there is only one whole… sum. A self-consistent solution. That implies much.”