Let's see . . . log tables danced through his head like celestial fire and a chorus of angels followed him through a millisecond of swift calculation.... It came out to a little less than 5.026 revolutions per hour. No wonder I can't see it spin! He smiled and pulled the distant descendant of a slide rule from its socket and put it away.
Forces, stronger now, pushed him tightly against his harness. The station was swelling enormously. There came a brief roar, the middle sphere filled the screen, and then they were stopped, five hundred meters from the staring eye of a god. Brendan smiled. His imagery was poor. It was more like a mouth. They were in zero g now and he heard someone whimper.
There was a soft thumping of RCS jets and the ship tumbled to point its nose at the hole. The hub of Alpha- enclave-Kosmograd was a thousand meters in diameter, its orificeeight hundred, and around its rim he read, 'Welcome to A-en-Kos III.'
The GM155 poised motionless for an instant, then the jets hissed again and it moved gingerly forward. The hole expanded, a fearsome maw out of which pale light spilled, and then they plunged through the dense em-gas-screen with a faint tremor. Suddenly they were hanging suspended above the landscape of an inside-out world, above a clutter of machines and tiny spacecraft. GM155 was a giant of sorts here, all of seventy meters long.
There was air in the hub of the station, pressurized to a hundred millibars, and the ship was buffeted by weak winds, driven by the faint Coriolis forces of the slow spin. Had they waited long enough, their inertia would have been overcome, and they too would have begun to turn. It was not to be. Gas jets hissed again; this time not a rocket flame but oxygen bled off from the Hyloxso matrices of the fuel pods. There could be no allowable contamination of a closed environment. The ship swept close to the metal surface of the world, following the imperceptible direction of spin, turned tail foremost, and dropped gently to a low-g landing. They were down.
In time, the Seedees grew used to the idea of how their lives would change. They came to accept the presence of a real, scientific God in their lives, to work with it and to accept its goals as their own. With their help, it grew and changed. Centrum, the Starseeder's artificial brain, their lineal descendant, squatted in its great ship and manipulated the Seedees to its own ends, to the ends that its makers had instilled in it in the early years of creation. It bent them to the will of the Grand Design. The ship was modified and enlarged. The ideas that Centrum had had in all the idle years while the Seedees evolved were implemented. The ship was filled with the tools of a vast trade and all the beings who had lived below embarked. All was ready. For the first time in a hundred million years the photon drive was ignited. A great spear of coherent electromagnetic radiation lanced out into space, a spear capable of destroying: whole worlds, and for a while the star system wasilluminated by its light. Slowly at first, then ever faster, the ship accelerated away, bent on the second phase of its mission. Left behind, Mother Ocean still teemed with life, but intelligence no longer brightened her deeps. The ship went on and on, cruising among the stars for more than a billion years. The aeons passed. Centrum directed and the Seedees worked. They worked and, in the end, were absorbed into the processes of the artificial brain. The ship stopped here and there, intent on its task. Whenever a methane world was found, the ship tarried for a little while and simmered with the effort of building up excess population. When it left, it left behind a little colony of Seedee life and, in orbit, a duplicate ship containing an immature brain, a young god.
Whenever they encountered one of the increasingly common silicate worlds, a special task unfolded. Matter gathered from the hydroxyl clouds was set upon the path of its natural process but accelerated. Centrum directed, and the Seedees built the little ships then. . . . That is what they were, tiny replicas, in water and carbon, of the great ship itself. Made from the worshiped substance of the ancient, dead Star-seeders, they contained a tiny, simplified brain, the immortal genes of an immortal mind, and even submicroscopic versions of the Seedees themselves. All of it was imbued with the single command: replicate. Evolution would come on its own, from the driving forces of Chance. Changes, when they occur, accumulate.
It went on and on, for ages more, while irreparable damage built up within Centrum. With the passage of time, the Seedees grew weary from their labor and began to die off. The ecosystem of the ship began to falter and then the downward progress was swift. The pressure of a building entropy pushed at them, and all things must run down, come to a final halt. The Brain might outlast the universe but not so the ship and Seedees. They were tired, giving in to the
Dreaming Sun was the last of his kind. A thousand years had passed since he had last coupled with a fading soul,trying to extract the last bits of its selfhood from a thin flow of oil. He was alone now with Centrum, old, and crippled with the accumulation of unsought change, yet the Brain was reluctant to absorb him. It too feared loneliness, for it remembered that time between the death of the Starseeders and the rise of the Seedee worlds. Without the methane beings, the Grand Design could not be pursued. .
. . The ship had been steered to a rendezvous with an old colony world, hoping for a new crew, but the navigation was faulty, the star had been missed. The programs were deteriorating and there were none to effect repairs. The ship drifted.
Dreaming Sun sighed, a long string of meaningless pheromonic bubbles. Weary, weary, weary . . . Centrum saw that the end was near, could be put off no longer. Time to extract one last bit of meaning, make a last update on the dying data file. Come to me, it said. Dreaming Sun committed the last act of defiance of his species, a requiem for the Seedee people whose duration on the void had been so overruled by voices from the remote past: he opened his valves, expelled his oil, and dissipated, abandoning his God at last. His shell drifted away on the currents of the methane sea, empty, and Centrum was alone.
The ship drifted, rudderless, forever, and Centrum, trapped within, began to dream its endless dreams. Mass began to accumulate. The lander lost its hold and fell into an orbit. The fuel pods dropped away and followed. A little nebula formed around the ship as it drifted through a matter-rich region of space. It became a little star, with icy moons for planets. The ship was trapped then, the lonely Centrum hidden within. Under endless layers of gas and stone, the detection mast could no longer see the sky. It drifted, and Iris was born.
Were there other ships? That is unknown. There might have been. There were many worlds.
Times past still bubbled from within.
Deepstarlay in the grappling hold of
