Now I know what to send, he thought with satisfaction. Dwer raised the hammer and brought it smashing down on the second crystal. That instant, his back swarmed with a curious tingling. The feeling came and left quickly.
His duty done at last, Dwer reached for the gas-discharge rope. The battleship was going to pass close again, and the only way he had to maneuver was to lose height.
Easy does it, he thought. Let her down slowly. Might as well reach the foothills before you have to…
The great ship loomed rapidly, then streaked westward while gaining altitude, missing him by hundreds of arrowflights.
Alas, this time it did not ignore Dwer.
As it hurried by, the mighty blue globe dropped a tiny speck. A minuscule dot that arced away and then dropped rapidly, glittering as it came. Dwer did not have to know much about Galactic technology to recognize a missile when he saw one.
Gillian mentioned that I might attract attention when I signaled.
Dwer sighed, watching the fleck turn a gentle curve and then plunge straight toward him.
Ah, well, he thought, picking up his prize possession — the bow made for him by the master carvers of Ovoom Town, in honor of his skill as tracker for the Commons of Six Races.
When the explosion came, it was unlike anything he expected.
Gillian
THAT’S IT!” SHE CRIED OUT, GLAD OF THE NEWS.
Even more elated was Sara, who let out an urrish sounding yelp, on learning that her brother yet lived.
The signal also confirmed Gillian’s best guess. The Jophur had been slow reacting, but they were doing as she hoped.
“They are predictable,” commented the Niss, whose whirling hologram passed through oxy-water bubbles unperturbed. “The delay only means we get more of a head start.”
Gillian agreed, but in her thoughts added:
We’ll need ten times this much of a lead, in order to make it all the way.
Aloud, she told the pilot:
“Punch us out of here, Kaa. Stay with swarm number two. Put us second from the front of the pack.”
The pilot shouted,“Aye!”
Soon the low, driving harmonies of the motivators notched upward in pitch. Gillian glanced at the engineroom display. Morale seemed high among Suessi’s crewfen. As she watched, Emerson D’Anite threw his head back to sing! Gillian only picked up a fragment, though the lyrics had Emerson’s coworkers in stitches.
“Jijo, Jijo…
It’s off to war we go!”
Even suffering from brain affliction, his puns were terrible. It was good to have some of the old Emerson back again.
External displays showed the planet swiftly receding, a gentle blue-brown globe, swathed in a slim envelope of life-giving weather. Numerous sharp-bordered green patches testified to where some metropolis once stood, before the site was scoured and seeded. Whether now covered with swamp, forest, or prairie, the regions still showed regular outlines that would take eons to erase.
Earth has such scars, she thought. In even greater abundance. The difference is that we were ignorant and didn’t know better. We had to learn the hard way how to manage a world, by teaching ourselves.
Gillian glanced at Sara, whose eyes bore pain and wonder, watching her homeworld diminish to a small orb — the first of her sooner line to look down at Jijo, ever since her ancestors fled here, centuries ago.
A place of refuge. A sanctuary for Earthlings and others. They all meant to hunker down, cowering away from the cosmos, each race redeeming its heritage in its own peculiar way.
Then we brought the universe crashing in on them.
She watched Lieutenant Tsh’t move among the crewfen at their dome consoles, encouraging them with bursts of sonar, always checking for lapses of attention. The meticulous supervision hardly seemed necessary. Not one of the elite bridge staff had ever shown a trace of stress atavism. All were guaranteed high uplift classifications when they got home.
If we get home.
If there is still a home, waiting for us.
In fact, everyone knew the real reason why half the crew had been left behind on Jijo, along with the Kiqui and copies of Streaker’s records.
We don’t have much of a chance of escaping … but it might be possible to draw the universe away from Jijo. Diverting its attention. Making it forget the sooners, once again.
It would take skill and luck just to achieve that sacrifice. But if successful, what an accomplishment! Preventing the extinction of the g’Kek, or the unwanted transformation of the traeki, or the discovery and blame that would befall Earth, if human sooners were exposed here.
If this works, we’ll have a complete cache of Earthlings on Jijo — humans, chimps, and now dolphins, too. A safety reserve, in case the worst happens at home.
That seems worthwhile. A result worth paying for.
Of course, like everything in the cosmos, it would come at a price.
They had passed Loocen — the moon still glittering with abandoned cities — and accelerated about a million kilometers beyond when the detection officer declared:
“Enemy cruiser leaving atmosphere! Vectoring after swarm number one!”
The spatial schematic showed a speck rising from Jijo, larger and brighter than any other, lumbering to accelerate its titanic mass.
We could outrun you, once, Gillian thought. We still can … for a while.
Even handicapped by the irksome carbon sheathing, Streaker would spend some time increasing the gap between her and the pursuing battleship. Newtonian inertia must drag down the heavier Jophur — that is, until it reached speeds adequate for level-zero hyperdrive.
Then the speed advantage would start to shift. If only a transfer point were nearer. Gillian shook her head, and kept on wishing.
If only Tom and Creideiki were here. They’d get us away without much trouble, I bet. I could retire to sick bay with confidence, treating dolphins for itchy-flake and spending my copious free time contemplating the mysteries of Herbie.
In a moment of decision, she had elected to take along the billion-year-old mummy, despite the high likelihood Streaker would be destroyed in a matter of hours or days. She could not part with the relic, which Tom had fought so hard to snatch from a fleet of ghost ships in the Shallow Cluster — back in those heady days before the whole Civilization of the Five Galaxies seemed to turn against Streaker.
Back when the naive crew expected gratitude for their epochal discovery.
Never surprise a stodgy Galactic, went a Tymbrimi saying. Unless you’re prepared with twelve more surprises in your pocket.
Good advice.
Unfortunately, her supply of tricks was running low. There were, in fact, only a few left.
The Sages
THE LATEST GROUP OF PILGRIMS UNDERSTOOD more now, about the Holy Egg.
More than Drake and Ur-Chown knew, when they first stared at the newly emerged wonder, glowing white- hot from its fiery emergence. Those two famed heroes conspired to exploit the Egg for their own religious and political purposes, declaring it an omen. A harbinger of unity. A god.
Now the sages have printouts provided by the dolphin ship. The report, downloaded from a unit of the Great Galactic Library, calls the Egg—a psi-active geomorph. A phenomenon observed on some life worlds whose tectonic restoration processes are smoothly continuous, where past cycles of occupation and renewal had certain temporal
