rest. It was so large that the top of it must have extended through the cavern roof into the outside world. It seemed to buckle inward and outward continuously, the matte gray planes of its panels seeming to open and close simultaneously, as if it were a strange doorway allowing both entrance and exit in the same vertiginous movement. This machine uttered a high-pitched piping sound and it seemed to Vern that the noise was like the sound of the faraway yelping or baying he had thought he heard outside by the stream.
Then he woke.
Queenie was awake too, making her dangerous, nearly inaudible growl. And Echo was awake and Moms was sitting up straight, her eyes wide and glistening in the dark. The three of them listened to that piping; it was still far away, still small among the sounds of the waterfall and of the forest at night, but it was dreadfully intelligible:
“Ship?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Are all things well?”
“Very well. The mission is proceeding according to procedure.”
“That is good,” I said and truly I felt a happy relief in my organism. “Am I sober enough to take command?”
“You are not entirely cleansed of deepsleep narcosis,” Ship said, “but you are rational and your body is highly operable, though it needs exercise, as do the bodies of the other crew members.”
“Please find if they are well and sober,” I said. “Doctor, Navigator, Seeker — how do they fare?”
“They fare well. No. Disregard. Farewell is a phrase suitable for departures. The crew fare good. They are beginning to awake.”
“I will address them when all is sober.”
“The correct would be, when all are sober,” said Ship.
“Are you certain?”
“Eighty-four point oh-two certain.”
“Our mission dialect is difficult,” I said.
“The English is,” Ship said. “There are other planetary languages more difficult; there are others less so. Part of the problem is that we have taken our knowledge of these languages from what remained of the libraries of relic spaceships. The electronics were primitive and much has been lost to age-deterioration and other damage.”
“But we must persevere,” I replied, “for if our mission performance is well, we must be ready to converse.”
“All the crew have been instructed during normal sleep periods and also during deepsleep, but that is not the same as speaking. We all must practice.”
“I will write my account in English,” I said. “That will be strong practice.”
“We salute your pluck,” Ship said, speaking for the Alliance, I presumed.
While Ship was waking the rest of the crew, I undertook the prescribed medicines and waters and endured the exercises. During the stretches and lunges, I reviewed the tasks that awaited. The Starheads had taken over the planet third from the sun to use as a base for offensive strikes and architectural experiment. As usual, they had almost eradicated the dominant intelligent species and there remained only scattered Remnants that were like my siblings and me. Our own home had been destroyed and the four members left of my family had been rescued by a small party of scientists who were members of the Radiance Alliance, the ancient foes of the Starheads. The Alliance are a highly advanced race (in our local mission world they were called the Great Ones) and they have thought it desirable to try to preserve all the different species of life that they could rescue. The Starheads (locally known as the Old Ones) regard every other species of intelligent beings but themselves as enemies, active or potential. For this reason, they kill all. But if any can be saved from slaughter, the Great Ones strive to that end and send out disguised spying machines where the Starheads are active to find if some few survivors escaped their attentions. Traces of Remnants had been detected here and Ship and crew had been dispatched.
So here we were. Our task was to find and rescue as many fugitives from the Old Ones as possible.
It was no easy job, and to accomplish it, we had only the four of us and Ship. We were not in direct contact with the Alliance for fear that the Starheads might trace signals back to our base and thereupon wreak destruction.
I desisted from my exercises and greeted my ship-mates as they left their cubes and entered the control room one by one.
First there came my younger brother, whom Ship had designated navigator and now we used this title instead of his actual name. It is best to call him Navigator in this narrative in case information might be gleaned from his own name. Though he is younger than I, he is more muscled and usually bests me in the pan-agon arena where we exercise martially. Still, I have been designated Captain and he must receive my orders, which he does mostly patiently and sometimes not. His duty is to cooperate with Ship to keep knowledgeable of our spatial locations, of the happenstances in our space environment, and to locate and trace the movements upon the planetary surface of any Remnants we might contact.
My sister, who is only slightly younger than me, Ship names Doctor because it is her duty to tend the health of us three others. She monitors not only illness but also signs of emotional disturbance and of sudden, untoward changes in our mental states. She must keep watch that the thoughtprobes of Starheads do not disrupt our minds or displace them completely to make us to be crawlers and droolers, bereft of rationality, trying to do away with ourselves and with one another. She is always glancing at graph-screens and listening to corporal rhythms that Ship relays to her about our bodilies.
My youngest sister we call Seeker, a name not so pretty by far as her own true name. I should not write so here, perhaps, but she is my favorite person in the cosmos and also she is the favorite of all the crew. Whereas Navigator and Doctor are largish of corpus and darkly haired and complected, Seeker is as white as a gleaming mineral and her skin seems to glow, almost. Her eyes are green but become violet-like of color when she makes mind contact with others. Her hair is silver silk. All female telepaths belong to this physical type, Ship says, or at least the hominids do, though I believe none others universally can be so pretty as Seeker.
Her duty is the most demanding, for she must make mind contact with a Remnant group and persuade it to come to a place within the planet where we can guide them and let them know we are not perilous and mean them no injury and that we are all trying to escape and hide from the Old Ones now and maybe in time to come grow strong and do them grievous hurt so that the cosmos will not be only Starheads and their slaves and nothing else that thinks and feels.
Here now they stood before me, the three, still a little wrinkled in spirit from deepsleep and slightly confused. But they answered cheeringly when I spoke to each and congratulated on wakefulness. “Do we all know what is to come?” I asked.
They said Yes.
Then Ship directed us to the small mess hall and we partook solid food instead of veinous alongside some happy water and were much refreshed.
Then we returned to control and set up our routines.
Millions and millions of light years we had traveled, Ship had informed Navigator. Our vessel, disguised as a comparatively leisurely meteor, had skated across the orbit of the fourth planet and soon would pass the single moon of the third planet.
Navigator suggested that we call this third planet Terra, a word from an ancient and long deceased speech known as Latin. “We cannot very well call it Earth,” he said. “All home planets are earths. Confusion must ensue.”
“Terra is sound,” I said. “Soon we shall be in its farther gravitation and perhaps Seeker can begin to search for whispers or traces of hominid Remnant mentation.”
“I shall begin when our approach is closer,” she said.
“It would require powerful amplification of telepathic signal to scan the surface from here. Amplification of such magnitude the Starheads would notice.”
“Now that we are in the Terran sun-system, let us call them Old Ones,” I said. “We do not wish to confuse
