"We don"t. I live in the time of waiting. We expect it to last for several tens of thousands of years. It may be that we will finally understand ourselves through our stories. Many think that once such comprehension is reached, we will simply cease to be. Then there are also those who expect us to carry on in harmony with the planet until the sun itself grows cold and all life is ended. Whatever our fate, I will never know. I am a simple custodian of our life and essence for a short period. That is my purpose. I am content with that and the wondrous stories I will hear in my short time. Can you say the same with your life?"

"How well you know me already, Tyzak. No, my life lacks the surety and tranquillity of yours. Perhaps if I am successful in knowing what I wish to know of your ancestors, things will get better for me."

"I have sorrow for you. I will do what I can to help your story finish well."

"Thank you."

"It"s the local star," Gore announced in midafternoon.

The Delivery Man glanced up through the canopy of furry branches overhead. He and Tyzak were tramping through a forest where the hot air was still and humid, heavy with a pepper-spice pollen. He squinted against the sharp slivers of sunlight slicing down past the lacework of dangling blue and green leaves. "What"s wrong with it?"

"Nothing. The zero-width wormhole used to extend a hundred and eighty million clicks. That"s how far we are from the primary. There"s nothing else at that distance. The Last Throw Last Throw ran a sweep." ran a sweep."

"That"s a huge volume of s.p.a.ce to cover with one sensor sweep. It could easily have missed something, especially if it was stealthed. Or maybe the station changed orbit."

"You"re thinking like a human. Stop it. The Anomine didn"t have anything to hide."

The Delivery Man gave a loud laugh, which startled several of the big clumsy birds from the treetops. "They hid the elevation mechanism well enough, didn"t they?"

"It"s not hidden. We just don"t know how to look for it through their perception."

"That sounds like the argument of a desperate man." Or worse, a crazy obsessive Or worse, a crazy obsessive.

"Son, you"re following a monster through a forest on an alien planet, hoping it"ll ultimately take you back to your family. Please don"t talk to me about desperate, okay?"

"All right, but answer me this: Why would you want to open a wormhole into the middle of a star? You"d kill the planet on the other end."

"It"s a zero-width wormhole; nothing physical pa.s.ses down it."

The Delivery Man could picture Gore"s face perfectly, gold skin at the side of his eyes creased slightly as he frowned in annoyed perplexity. "Okay, so what information can it gather from a star?"

"Not the star directly. There must be some kind of sensor bobbing about under the corona. Or maybe deeper. We know they love their research experiments."

"We do, but we need the end result, remember?" He took a guess what Gore"s next question was going to be; the impatience was obvious.

"How long until you get here?" Gore asked.

The Delivery Man smiled at the forest. "Give us another five hours."

"For Christ"s sake!"

"We"re making good time," he objected. "Tyzak isn"t exactly the youngest Anomine in his village."

"All right. I"ll be waiting."

The Delivery Man thought it best not to point out that five hours would only bring them to the edge of the city.

Dusk had already drained the sky of vitality when they began traversing the flat gra.s.sland that skirted the Anomine city. It was a curiously unnerving walk. Unlike a human city, there was no gradual buildup of the urban zone; here it was clearly defined. One minute the suspiciously level and uniform gra.s.s was underfoot, the next the Delivery Man was treading on a concrete-equivalent street with a bulbous skysc.r.a.per rising high into the ash-gray sky in front of him. Lights were starting to come on inside every building. There didn"t seem to be windows in the human architecture mode; these ma.s.sive structures had a skin that was partially translucent. Staring at it hard, the Delivery Man thought he saw some kind of movement in the faint moire threads that suffused the substance, as if it were a very slowly moving liquid. That was when he realized it was the high-technology version of the membranes in the village houses.

The deeper they walked into the city, the darker the sky above became. It was mere minutes before the Delivery Man was completely surrounded by the hulking buildings. He"d been in enough Anomine cities since they"d arrived in the system not to be perturbed by the layout and profiles, but something about being with Tyzak made this experience different. It seemed ... not as deserted as it appeared. Warm soft light illuminated the streets, creating a blend of multicolored shadows playing across each surface. More than once he thought he caught them fluttering from the corner of his eye. The sensation of being watched was so great that he finally gave in and ordered his biononics to run a fast field scan.

Obviously there was nothing. But that cold logic did nothing to dispel the haunting sensation.

"Do you have stories of ghosts?" he asked Tyzak.

"Your translation machine is struggling with the word. Do you mean an essence which lingers after the living body has died?"

"Yes."

"There are stories of our ancestors who transferred their thoughts into machines so they might continue after their biological bodies failed."

"Yes, humans do that, but that"s not quite what I mean. It would be an existence without physical form."

"That is where they went after the separation. This is the method which you seek."

"No. Not quite. This is something from our legends, stories that may be fiction. It is nonsense, but it persists."

"We have no stories of such a thing."

"I see. Thank you."

Tyzak continued along the street in his long, fast bobbing motion, not even turning to focus on the Delivery Man. "But the city does speak to me with the smallest stories."

"It does?"

"Not a sound. But a voice nonetheless."

"That"s interesting. What story is it telling you?"

"Where my ancestors left this place. This is how we will find it."

The Delivery Man wanted to say: But you don"t use machines But you don"t use machines. He knew that was what the communication must be, a download into the Anomine equivalent of human macrocellular cl.u.s.ters, a little genetic modification that the remaining Anomine hadn"t purged from themselves, after all.

"We made a.s.sumptions again," Gore said. "We thought Tyzak was familiar with the elevation mechanism. But he"s got to ask the surviving AIs."

"No," the Delivery Man said. "That"s not what he"d do; I know him well enough by now. He"d rather risk getting torn apart by wild animals at night than use a decent weapon to defend himself with. This is something else." He ran a more comprehensive field scan. "Nothing is being transmitted, at least that I can detect. Yet I"m still getting the creeps about this place. You"ve been here two days. Has it bothered you?"

"Ghosts and goblins? No."

Typical, the Delivery Man thought. But he was still disquieted by the city, and Tyzak was receiving information of some kind, which was impacting in a fashion his biononics couldn"t detect. He ran another scan. Sonic. Chemical. Electromagnetic. Visual/subliminal. Microbial. Surface vibration. Anything known to discomfort a human body.

The city wasn"t active in any way. Yet when he"d walked through previous Anomine cities without Tyzak, he"d felt none of this. So if the effect isn"t impacting from the outside So if the effect isn"t impacting from the outside ... The Delivery Man opened his gaiamotes fully and searched amid his own thoughts. ... The Delivery Man opened his gaiamotes fully and searched amid his own thoughts.

It was there, hovering out of reach like a foreign dream on the fringes of the gaiafield generated by the nests they"d left orbiting above. A mind, but woven from notions very different from those human sentience was composed of. Colors, smells, sounds, emotions-they were all amiss, out of phase with what he perceived as correct.

"h.e.l.lo?" he said to it.

There was a reaction, he was sure of that. A tiny stratum of the strange thoughts twisted and turned. There was even a weak sensation, not a thought or memory but an impression: an animal curled up sleeping, contracting further as something poked its skin.

So we can understand each other. Except the city didn"t want to, because he was not part of the city, not part of the world. He didn"t belong, didn"t connect. He was alien. There was no regret or even hostility within the somnolent mind. The city didn"t hold opinions on him; it simply knew he wasn"t a part of itself or its purpose.

"The AI is neural-based," he told Gore. "I can sense it within the gaiafield. It"s semiactive but only responds to an Anomine"s mind. We"re never going to get any information out of it."

"s.h.i.t."

"How ironic is that? One wish, one thought from a native, and the whole city will revive itself to provide them a life they can"t even imagine anymore. Yet they"re happy with the whole been-there-done-that philosophy."

They were trotting down a long boulevard that led up a steepening slope. Slim arches linked the buildings on either side, each one glowing with a uniform color, as if the bands of a rainbow had been split apart and then twisted around. His exovision was displaying a map. "You know, we"re heading your way."

"Yeah, I see that."

"Actually, we"re heading directly for you. That can"t be coincidence."

"Sonny, I"ve given up on being surprised by anything this planet pitches at us."

It took them another hour to navigate the city"s broad streets. Tyzak walked on unhesitatingly, though toward the end the big alien did seem to be laboring to bounce forward with the vitality he"d possessed that morning. Even the Delivery Man"s biononic-aided muscles were starting to feel the strain. They"d been walking for fifteen hours with only a few short breaks.

But with the stars barely visible through the cloying light haze cast by the buildings, they finally came out into the open plaza. It was a broad empty circle seven hundred meters in diameter, with long garden segments of dense green-gray shrub trees ringing the outside. Towers and elongated globes over a kilometer high stood around the edge, something about their height and proximity giving the impression that they were leaning in protectively.

It was a slightly incongruous setting for the Last Throw Last Throw, but Gore had brought the starship down on one side of the plaza, close to a swollen cylindrical tower with a blunt dark apex. The gold man was already striding over the plaza to greet them, casting a range of pale harlequin shadows in all directions that shifted like petals as he approached. He stopped in the middle of the plaza and bowed gracefully to the old Anomine.

"Tyzak, I am honored that you should spend time telling us the story of your ancestors" departure."

The Delivery Man raised his eyebrow as he realized that the sharp chittering sounds of Anomine language were coming directly from Gore"s throat.

"It is a joy to do so," Tyzak replied. "Your coloration is different. Are you more advanced than your species colleague?"

"In this form, I am not, no. My body is from a time long past. Circ.u.mstances required me to adopt it once more."

"I am glad you have. You are interesting."

"Thank you. Can you tell us where your most sophisticated ancestors departed this world from?"

The Delivery Man almost winced at the bluntness.

"Right here," Tyzak said.

Gore pointed a golden forefinger at the matte gla.s.s surface of the plaza. "Here?"

"Yes."

Gore turned full circle, almost glaring at the shiny surface of the broad plaza. "So we"re actually standing on the machine which changed them into their final form?"

"Yes."

The Delivery Man"s biononics performed a deep field function scan on the substance below his feet. Gore was doing exactly the same thing. The plaza was actually a solid cylinder extending nearly five hundred meters down into the city"s bedrock. Its nuclear structure was strange, with strands and sheets of enhanced long-chain molecules twisting and coiling around and through one another like smoke tormented by a hurricane. They were all cold and inert. But they did seem to be affecting the underlying quantum fields to a minute degree, an effect so small that it barely registered.

He"d never seen anything like it before. The smartcore certainly couldn"t identify it or any of the functions the weird molecular arrangements would produce if they went active. When he opened his gaiamotes, he could just sense the elevation mechanism"s soft thoughts, even more abstract than those of the city"s mind. With a despondent curse he knew there was never going to be any possible connection between it and a human. It would take Tyzak or his kind to coax it back to awareness and functionality.

"They really didn"t want anyone to follow them, did they?" Gore said pensively.

"Looks that way."

"Huh. Then along came me. Right, then." His hands went onto his hips as he looked up at Tyzak. "Will you ask the machine to switch on for me, please."

"The machine which separated our ancestors from us is not a part of my life. It has discharged its purpose. The planet has destined us for something different."

"That"s it? That"s your last word on this?"

"How could it be other?"

"The galaxy may be destroyed if we don"t establish how your ancestors left this universe."

"That is a story which I would not repeat at any gathering. It lacks foundation in our world."

"And if I could prove it was true?"

"If that is what awaits this planet, then it is what awaits us also. The planet carries us."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n fatalists," Gore muttered.

"Now what?" the Delivery Man asked. It was hard to keep a tone of defeat from his voice.

"Stop complaining, start thinking. We"ll just have to hack into it, is all."

"Hack into it?" into it?"

"The control net, not the actual machine. Once you"ve got control of the power switch, you"re in charge, period."

"But we"re hardly talking about a management processor. This thing is a cross between a confluence nest and metacube network. You can"t subvert it. The b.l.o.o.d.y thing"s sentient, half-alive."

"Then we physically chop the connections and insert our own command circuitry into the mechanism itself. Now shut up. Have you run a comparison review of the other fifty-three zero-width wormholes we found?"

"What? I-No."

"Stay current. Every one of them is right next to an open s.p.a.ce like this plaza. In other words, there are at least fifty-four elevation mechanisms on the planet. Makes sense, really. There were too many high-level Anomine for a single gathering point, especially if they really did all come back from their colony worlds. The upgrade to postphysical must have gone on for a long time."

"Yes, I"m sure it must."

"Good. So how did they power it? If you"re bootstrapping yourself up to archangel status, that"s going to take a lot of energy, especially when you"re using a machine that"s nearly half a cubic kilometer of solid-state systems." He turned to stare at the bulging tower that backdropped the Last Throw Last Throw and wagged an accusatory gold finger at it. "But if you"ve got a cable that plugs directly into the nearest star, power is the least of your worries." and wagged an accusatory gold finger at it. "But if you"ve got a cable that plugs directly into the nearest star, power is the least of your worries."

"Ah, the wormhole doesn"t carry information ..."

"No way. They"ve got some kind of energy siphon swimming about in the photosphere or maybe deeper. It sends all the power they need back along the zero-width wormhole. Okay, that works for me. We"d best go see if the siphon"s still there."

For a moment, words refused to come out of the Delivery Man"s mouth. "Why?"

"What part of "I don"t give up easy" is hard for you?"