uniform and highly polished that he wondered if the whole world was an artifact. The high curvature showed that the object must be no more than a few tens of kilometers across. Making such a thing would be trivial to the technology that far earlier had been able to turn Uranus into a new sun and change the whole face of the solar system.
He sniffed and was aware again of the charnel-house smell of his own body within his suit. The sniff was one of self-disgust — and not only at his smell. He ought to have learned over the centuries and millennia not to make flying leaps of logic. What proof was there that the progress of technology had been uniform, always in the direction of advancing capabilities? He already knew of three eras in which the definition of “progress” had changed, and there had been time since then for a hundred or a thousand such transitions. Certainly, nothing that he had seen in this resurrection suggested an orderly progression of civilization from Ariel’s time to this one. Other than basic astronomy, everything seemed beyond his knowledge and comprehension.
And where was Milton? Drake thought of his Servitor for the first time since his own resurrection. He could not imagine Milton deserting him, for as long as the Servitor possessed consciousness. It was more evidence of the passage of time while he had drowsed in electronic storage.
The crawlers had been heading steadily around the curve of the surface. The top of a building was appearing on the horizon. As he came closer Drake saw that it formed a squat truncated pyramid, its shiny gold walls jutting upward against the star-strewn sky. The crawlers led him toward an open door, about two feet square, sitting at the building’s base. It was barely big enough, but Drake lay on his belly and inched forward, following the crawlers through and up a gently spiraling tunnel. Another translucent wall lay at the end. He pushed through that membrane and found himself in a dimly lit chamber about twenty feet square and six feet high. The floor was more of the sticky, milky sheet on which he had first awakened. The walls had foot-wide round apertures spaced along them, windows providing views of the smooth outside surface and the dazzling star field. The center of the chamber was occupied by a transparent column filled with pink bubbling liquid. Scores of the black umbrella crawlers littered the floor, while half a dozen were slotted into a set of narrow letter-box slits that rose vertically against one wall.
Drake stood up, his suited head touching the low ceiling. It was not easy to balance on a surface that bowed beneath his feet like a great air balloon, and apparently standing was in any case the wrong thing to do. The crawlers immediately became noisy. Drake heard a frenzy of clicks and chirps and hisses. The nearest ones came across to him, swarmed up onto his body, and pushed at him with their thin spokes. It was enough to throw him off his uncertain balance, and he toppled lightly to the cushioned floor. The crawlers settled by his side, silent as long as he did not attempt to rise.
He wanted to explore the other parts of the building, and tackle the difficult problem of communicating with the crawlers.
He lay back on the floor, thinking that the pyramid might be some sort of ground transportation device. Was it trundling them to another part of the surface, where he would learn what was happening? He turned his head and stared out of the nearest wall aperture.
The outside surface was moving. They were traveling not along it, but away from it. He could see farther around the curve of the world, and more of the star field.
He had been close; not a method for ground transportation, yet still a transportation system. Drake lay silent, pressed to the soft floor. The squat pyramid accelerated harder away from the surface and headed for open space.
The ship was more proof, if proof were needed, of profound change that could hardly be described as progress. The technique of inertia shedding, which Drake had never understood, had been in use when he fled to Canopus more than fourteen million years ago. Now that secret was lost, or ignored. He felt in full each change in the ship’s acceleration, by the change to his own apparent weight.
He still lay with his head to one side, facing the nearest porthole. In the first seconds of flight, the port had filled with an intolerable blue-white brightness that forced him to close his bleary and aching eyes. He realized after a few seconds what it must be. They had risen far enough from the surface to be exposed to the light of a nearby star.
Think positively. That could be good news. With stars came planets, and perhaps people. He waited patiently, until the glare of light swung away from him to illuminate the rest of the chamber. He studied its color. The star that produced such light must be hotter, brighter, and younger than Sol. Unfortunately, that told him nothing about his particular location — there must be a billion stars like this in the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds.
The ship’s acceleration dropped dramatically. It was the signal for the crawlers to begin moving. About twenty of them moved to his side and disgorged hundreds of what Drake thought of as “workers.” The little turquoise insects moved onto his body and systematically began to remove his suit. More good news. He was heading away from the near vacuum of the little planetoid, presumably to a place where there would be breathable air. That suggested a planet.
But there was bad news, too. Drake examined his naked body as the transparent shielding was stripped away by the workers. It was visible proof of what he already knew from the way that he was feeling. Instead of being resurrected in a body that was stronger, fitter, and more long-lived than his old one, he now resided in a failing wreck. He could see the blackish green of gangrene on his fingers and toes. There was no feeling there, and soft tissue was already sloughing away. The rest of his hands and feet were cold and blue tinged. His forearms and calves were red and they felt warm. They were in the preliminary stages of mortification.
The internal changes were worse. He had not seen anything like food since he was resurrected, but in any case he knew that he would not be able to eat. His teeth felt loose in his head. His belly churned with gas, and there was an unspeakable taste in his mouth. His lungs fought harder for air with every breath. His eyes saw less clearly, their vision spotted with random dark patches.
It was not difficult to reach an overall assessment. He had been embodied in a near corpse, and the necrosis was spreading throughout his whole body. If he was to survive, he had to reach a place where technicians could work on him the sort of medical miracles that had once been possible. And he had to do it
Drake lifted himself onto his hands and knees and moved over to the porthole. This time the crawlers did not object. Three of them crabbed their way along at his side as he placed his nose close to the window. The surface was sticky and smelled like acetone.
He looked out. The planetoid where he had been resurrected was invisible, far behind them. To his left, the blue-white star dominated the heavens, outshining all the scattered millions of the Cloud cluster. The star loomed in the sky, three times the size of Sol from Earth. They were too close. Habitable planets, if there were any, ought to be farther out.
He looked, but it was an impossible task. A planet would be one more spark of light among the millions. A computer, attached to a telescope and observing for many days, might distinguish a planet from the starry background by comparing images and noting the planet’s motion over time relative to the slowly moving stars. But Drake did not have a computer; he did not have a telescope; and he was sure that he did not have many days.
Just as he concluded that finding a planet would be impossible, he saw a dark shape biting into the edge of the blue-white sun. He decided that he was indeed seeing a planet, then one second later realized that it could not be so. The shape was wrong — a sharp-edged oblong, rather than a circle — and it was growing in size far too fast. The ship could be no more than a few kilometers away from it. The object was far smaller than the planetoid that they had left a few minutes earlier. It was probably no more than a hundred meters along its longest side.
The ship drifted nearer, its drive powered down to provide a tiny final deceleration. As it came alongside the dark oblong, Drake could take a closer look. The surface was a roughened and pitted black, nothing like the shiny gold of the ship. It seemed perfectly flat and featureless, but presumably the crawlers knew better. Half a dozen of them had wandered across to the entry tunnel. They were hovering there as though waiting for him. There had been no attempt to provide him with another suit.
He wasn’t sure how much physical effort he could manage, but he had no choice. He lay on the floor and inched his way painfully through the white membrane and on into the spiraling tunnel. He could feel the rotting skin of his naked chest sticking to the tunnel floor, then tearing free as he pushed forward. At one point he could go no farther until the crawlers, behind and beside and ahead of him, eased him along through a tight spot.
