“I was trying to make myself look important,” O’Layle repeated.

“That’s what I was doing,” he said. And then he touched the hard cheek of the face, adding, “And that’s what you’ve been doing all along, too, I think. Alone and crazy, and loud, and full of shit … !”

THE AI SAGES had stopped talking.

The prisoner was thinking about everything it had learned, and by every means, it denied the mathematics and their consequences. Then in the middle of this grand internal debate, it felt itself changing again. Without warning, a neural tether merged with its swollen form. Working swiftly and with a grand delicacy, a second team of autodocs had linked it to the main polypond herself. Plainly, the captains hoped this new knowledge would infect the great living ocean. A change of mind would precipitate out of a few ethereal equations, and the war would finish with a whimper. It was such a foolish, self-deceptive plan that the prisoner, now linked with the She, could afford to be amused, enjoying all of this considerable talent and badly wasted energy.

The rubber-faced machines were leaving the long room.

Berating them with a harsh long laugh, the prisoner declared, “This won’t win anything, you know. Not even two moments of doubt, in the end.”

Through the prisoner, she asked, “What can you possibly tell me that I haven’t conceived on my own? With millions of years and all of my resources … what do machines like you offer me that can feel even a little new …?”

With a roar, both prisoner and polypond declared, “The universe is empty.”

They claimed, “The universe is waiting to be born.

“You should be helping me,” they roared with a mocking tone. “Not fighting me. To have the Creation arise from your actions … because of your cold hands … wouldn’t that be a wondrous beginning and the perfect ending … ?”

From between the mock-human bodies, a new body appeared.

The prisoner kept speaking, throwing insults and encouragements while its own mind was being purged and reconfigured by the living ocean. Then the words slowed to nothing. The polypond had abruptly fallen silent. Using the eyes grafted onto the coddled prisoner, the ancient alien watched with interest as a strange little alien dragged itself forward on a pair of long, leathery wings.

“What are you?” the prisoner asked.

Then with the same mouth, the polypond said, “No.”

Only the new alien and the polypond were inside the long chamber. With a much-practiced motion, the winged creature managed to pull its head up high, displaying a belly covered with little hooked feet.

A mouth lay among the feet.

In translation, the voice sounded flat and a little scared.

“Hello,” the newcomer muttered.

The mouth clenched for a moment, and the feet pulled in against the belly, and then the mouth opened again.

“I know nothing perfectly,” the creature cautioned. “But there are some good reasons to think that I am … maybe, maybe probably … that probably I am one of your little sisters …”

Thirty-nine

“You stupid, silly creature,” she said. “Don’t you see what I am to you … ?”

Nothing. Apparently that’s what Mere was. Her brazen words were followed by a prolonged silence and a perfect stillness. Watching the sky display, she continued to observe their long plunge into the Great Ship, and she secretly doubted if she had done even a little good. Then came the sudden violent slurp of water in motion, the world beneath her pushed aside by a whalelike mass. What resembled a pair of jaws rose high on both sides of Mere, and out of reflex, she hunkered down, throwing her sticklike arms around her bowed head.

In an instant, she was swallowed.

In another instant, the excess water had been purged, and she found herself collapsing on a cushioned bed, the wet air hot enough to burn, a great invisible hand shoving her downward, face and belly against a dense slick fat, the pressure almost suffocating her.

The whale was a small shuttle, she guessed.

The shuttle was changing trajectories, fighting the Great Ship’s enormous pull as well as its own momentum. Mere breathed in gasps and low sobs. When she had the energy, she managed to whisper, “We are much the same.” And with the next breath, she added, “In some ways, identical.”

“Are we?” said a close, curious voice.

“But what it is, what everyone assumes you are …” she began.

The acceleration increased, splintering the frailest of her little ribs.

“You are not,” Mere said, gasping with a wrenching pain.

“What am I not?”

“Gaian.”

The hull began to scream, a few first breaths of atmosphere racing past. She listened to the roar and listened for any other words. But the shuttle remained mute, diving steeply into the newborn atmosphere. Turbulence shook both of them, and the gee forces again pushed her deep into the glistening white-as-milk fat. Then the noise fell away into a lesser rumbling. Bruised arms lifted. Hands too small for a child closed into limp fists. Quietly, she wept, breathing with the tightest little breaths, and when the miseries didn’t lessen, she realized that for the first time in her life, she had a mortal’s body. The polypond had resurrected only the most ancient of her flesh, DNA and proteins dancing slowly, slowly and desperately trying to heal her myriad wounds.

“What am I?” the voice wondered.

With a sob, she said, “I do not know. Not exactly.”

“But I am similar to you, you think?”

“In a fashion—”

“Then what precisely are you?”

She told her story. With a gasping voice, in crisp, measured phrases, she explained how she had been born between the stars, alone. She described her solitude and the slow painful progression of light-years and the centuries. But her oblivion ended with a world and a living people, and that one, long, painful blessing continued to bring joy beyond measure as well as rich gifts of memory and belief.

Mere paused, and the shuttle began to split and deflate.

Within moments, the heat shield and flesh were ripped apart by an armored beak, and she found herself sitting on the narrow back of a very long avian—a giant albatross in form, but with its long wings folded into tough stubs and some kind of jet supplying thrust. They were flying across a brutally rough sea, barely high enough to avoid the tallest waves. Some kind of demon-door surrounded her, keeping the air motionless. Into that enforced stillness, she said, “You weren’t Gaian. And you aren’t. What the captains and I assumed from the first … we didn’t understand your history …”

“There is no history,” the polypond replied.

“Because every history is valid, or so claim the shadows.” Mere made herself laugh. “Every past is genuine and ignorable. Isn’t that what you believe?”

Silence.

She said, “Interesting.”

The sea beneath her was jammed with moving bodies and swift, brightly lit machines. Sprays of iridescent vapor rose high on either side, and pushing through the demon barriers and antinoise baffles were hints of thunder and titanic screams.

“I had stars to watch,” Mere continued. “My starship was nearly dead, but I could look out at a universe full of light. While you … you were drifting through the black cold depths of the nebula, alone …”

Again, silence.

“Your blessing was the ship that you were riding inside. I think. I think.” She nodded with a growing certainty. “It was intact, for the most part. It possessed a fully equipped recycling system—a biosphere in ajar, in essence—and if its engines were dead, at least you didn’t have much momentum to fight. You were drifting. Do you remember? Not well, I think. It was millions of years ago, after all. And you were a tiny, lonely, and possibly insane mind. Who knows how much of what you remember are only delusions?”