A great luminous band rose on the horizon, so bright and varied that it did not seem to be composed of stars, but rather of ivory and ice. Vast ragged lanes of dust sprawled across swarms of piercing light. These were the shreds of the galactic arm, a last rampart shielding the galactic center.

             The raccoon-beast knew that Earth had been deflected toward this central hub long ago, before its own kind had evolved, when Earth was verdant for the first time. The scope of such an undertaking was beyond its comprehension. It dimly sensed that the humans of that time had made the sun pass near another star, one that refused to shine in the night.

             A sharp veer around that dead, dark mass had sent the solar system plunging inward toward the great galactic bulge. The sun had crossed lanes of dust as the galaxy rotated, its spiral arms trailing like those of a spinning starfish. The constellations in Earth's nights warped and shifted. Ages passed. Life performed its ceaseless self-contortions. Fresh intelligences arose. Strange, alien minds came from distant suns.

             The purposes of that time were shrouded in ambiguity. The sun had followed a stretched ellipse that looped close to the galactic center. A shimmering sphere of light gradually grew in the heavens. To remain near this wheeling beeswarm of ten billion stars, yet another encounter had proved necessary. That time, legend said, the sun had brushed by a giant molecular cloud. Each time, gravity's tugs rearranged the stately glide of the planets. The precision of those soft collisions had been of such delicacy that the new orbits fit the needs of further vast engineering enterprises—the dismantling of whole worlds. Such had humans been, once.

             The raccoon-creature found a few planets—those which had survived that epic age of boundless ambition—among the great washes of light that hung above. Innumerable comet tails pointed outward from the sun toward gossamer banks of dim radiance. In such a crowded symphony of sky the slow gavotte of worlds seemed a minor theme.

             But tonight the heavens stirred with luminous trouble. Staring upward, the raccoon-creature watched red and orange lights flare and dodge and veer. Soundless and involuted, these were the scribbles of swift combat. The bright traces faded slowly.

             They were the first acts of hostility written on this broad sky for nearly a billion years. As before, they arose from the conflicts inherent in the minds of humans—that uneasy anthology of past influences.

             Their reptihan subbrains, tucked around the nerve stem, preserved a taste for ritual and violence. Surrounding that, the limbic brain brought an emotional tang to all thoughts—this, an invention of the early mammals. Together, these two ancient remnants gave humans their visceral awareness of the world.

             The furry creature which watched the flowering night knew, with a hard-won wisdom buried deep in its genes, that the battle above marked the emergence of something ancient and fearsome. Humanity's neocortex wrapped around the two animal brains in an unsure clasp. In some eras that grip had slipped, unleashing powerful bursts of creativity, of madness, of squandered energy.

             The neocortex did hold sway with its gray sagacity, directing its reasoning power outward into the world. But always the deeper minds followed their own rhythms. Some forms of the human species had integrated this triune brain after heroic struggle. Others had engineered the neocortex until it mastered the lower two with complete, unceasing vigilance.

             The raccoon-creature had a very different mind, the process of nearly a billion years more of design by both Darwinian winnowing and by careful pruning. Misgivings stirred in that mind now. The broad face wrinkled with complex, unreadable expressions. From its feral legacy it allowed itself a low, moaning growl colored with unease.

             Very little of humanity's history had survived the rub of millennia. In any case that tangled record, shot through by discordant voices, would not have been comprehensible to this creature.

             Still, it had a deep sense that it was witnessing in the streaked sky not a mere passing incident, but the birth of a savage new age. In the early eras of the human species, simpler minds had identified the dark elements of life with the random tragedies which humans suffered, from storm and disease and nature's myriad calamities. That time lay in the unimaginable past. Now humanity's greatest adversary had emerged again—not the unthinking universe, but itself. And so true evil had returned to the world.

20

             The woman dreamed for two days.

             She thrashed sometimes, calhng out hoarsely, her words slurred just beyond comprehension. The creature had carefully moved her to the shade of some tall trees whose branches formed curious curls like hooks at the very top. It foraged for simple fruit and held slices to the woman's mouth so the juice would trickle down her swollen throat. For itself small animals sufficed, which it caught by simply keeping still for long periods and letting them wander within reach. This was enough, for it knew how to conserve strength while never letting its attention wander from the woman's weak but persistent rhythms of regrowth.

             The uses of fantasy are many, and healing is not the least of these. She slept not merely because this was the best way to repair herself. Behind her jerking eyelids a thin layer outside the neocortex brain was rerunning the events which had led to her trauma. This sub-brain integrated emotional and physiological elements, replaying her actions, searching for some fulcrum moment when she might have averted the calamity.

             There was some comfort in knowing, finally, that nothing would have changed the outcome. When she reached this conclusion a stiffness left her and to the watching creature her body seemed to soften. Some memories were eventually discarded in this process as too painful to carry, while others were amplified in order to attain a kind of narrative equilibrium. This editing saved her from a burden of remorse and anxiety that, in earlier forms of humanity, would have plagued her for years after.

             In the second day she momentarily burst into a slurred song. At dusk she awoke. She looked up into the long, tapered muzzle of her watcher and asked fuzzily, "How many . . . lived?"

             "Only you, that I can sense." The creature's voice was low and yet lilting, like a bass note that had worked itself impossibly through the throat of a flute.

             "No . . . ?" She was quiet for a time, studying the green moon that swam beyond the mountains.

             She said weakly, "The Supras . . ."

             "They did this?"

             "No, no. I saw some humans, like us, in flyers. The Supras were engaged ... far away. I thought they would help us."

             "They have been busy." It gestured at the southern horizon. In twilight's dim gleaming a fat column of oily smoke stood like an obsidian gravestone.

             "What's . . ."

             "It has been there since yesterday." The looming distant disaster had strengthened the creature's resolution.

             "Ah." She closed her eyes then and subsided into her curious, eyelid-fluttering sleep. For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge and survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominids walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition she would not have been by her own judgment a true human.