Tomorrow and Tomorrow

the ship that was orbiting Lukoris.”

She did not need to say “the ship with Drake on board.”

“The statistics may make sense.” Tom Lambert was studying one of the displays. “But nothing else does. Look at this.”

The record of the final minutes on Lukoris existed in two forms. One of them showed events as seen by the sensors scattered around the surface. The other was Drake’s own perception as received through the mander embodiment.

According to the surface sensors, Lukoris was much the same as it had been in the previous year; or, for that matter, the past half million. Swamps, broken by clumps of scrubby plant life, stretched away flat and dull to the horizon, where mile-high scarps of rock loomed skyward. The sky above them was the unchanging sulfurous yellow of late summer.

But Drake’s view…

“What is he seeing!” Milton said. “And what does he think he’s doing}”

They were looking through the mander’s eyes as it walked forward across a sward of healthy turf and spring flowers. Milton, who had never seen old Earth, was justifiably puzzled. But Drake, seated in the headquarters’ War Room, knew where he was. He was having trouble answering Milton, because he also guessed what was coming next.

The mander embodiment had become human in form. It was walking barefoot on the Sussex Downs, one of Drake and Ana’s favorite vacation spots. She had been standing by a hedgerow, admiring a thrush’s nest. Now she turned at Drake’s approach and smiled a greeting. Spontaneously, without a word, they embraced.

In that first ecstatic moment, Drake in the War Room forced himself to look across to the other display. The sensors showed the mander, unchanged in form, standing motionless before a foot-high bulbous plant with spiky silver leaves.

“Freeze!” Drake said urgently. And then, to the others, “You know the earlier records. Is that” — he indicated the little plant — “new to Lukoris, or to this region? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

“It appears to be new.” The others, using the power of their composites, could answer almost at once and simultaneously.

“But what is the significance?” Par Leon asked. “It is nothing but a plant.”

“I’m not sure. Look for more of them.”

That analysis was also finished almost before the command was given. All of the Galaxy’s computing power was available when Drake asked for it. With such resources the problem was trivial. Using the spiky-leaved plant as a template for a matching algorithm, the global database of Lukoris was scanned and analyzed, every day of every year since observations first began.

“They’re all over the place,” Cass said. “This size or smaller. But ten years ago there were none. They’ve all sprung up in the past few years. Do you think they are real?”

“I’m sure they are. It’s the other scene that’s a false reality.” Drake hated to say that. He wanted what he had seen to be true, and he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes away from the image of Ana. “I think the plant is able to create an illusion in the mind of an intelligent being.”

“Why intelligent?” Par Leon asked.

“Imagination needs intelligence.” Drake gestured again to the first display. The mander stood motionless before the plant, while other animals wandering the swampy surface apparently took no notice. “There must be a certain minimum awareness, a level of intelligence before a mind can be made to imagine something other than what it receives through its senses.”

“Like hypnotism,” Melissa said. “The subject sees what she is told is there.”

Mel Bradley scowled. “Hypnotized by a plant ?”

“Do you have a better explanation?” Drake zoomed in on the mander. “Look at me. Cass can probably suggest a

thousand ways in which an electromagnetic signal, or a scent containing the right chemicals, could affect the functioning of the brain. Remember, the plant doesn’t change Lukoris. It just persuades the subject to see an alternate reality.”

“But what reality?” Milton sounded confused. “It surely can’t impose its own reality on someone.”

“No.” It did not surprise Drake that he knew what was happening when the others did not. His understanding was exactly proportional to his pain.

“Not its reality,” he went on. ” Your reality. It allows you to see, and to imagine that you live in, the reality that you desire beyond any other.”

He, more than anyone else in the universe, understood the seductive power of that vision. He would give anything to be that other Drake, kissing Ana in the quiet countryside. It was the siren call of the Shiva: Stay with me, and receive your heart’s desire.

Drake tried to explain that to the others, but after a while he realized it was not working. They could not know the mind of the other Drake, and it was impossible for any of them to feel what he was feeling. They were merely asking more questions.

“How does it reach the planet in the first place?” Tom Lambert said.

“I don’t know.”

“Is that it, the whole thing?” said Mel Bradley. “You think the Shiva are nothing but little plants?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the planetary defense systems failing …”

“And their spreading between the stars, between the galaxies… How?”

“And moving more slowly where we didn’t have colonies…”

“And the failure of the lost colonies to send any sort of message…”

“I don’t know.” Drake was longing to terminate this meeting, so that he could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of Ana embracing his other self — even if it was nothing but illusion, he wanted it.

“You’re missing the point,” he, continued. “This doesn’t prove that some spiky little silver plant is all there is to the Shiva. It doesn’t tell us how the Shiva spread, or why. It doesn’t say what happens to a world after they reach it. It tells us little about the Shiva themselves. But we still have a reason to celebrate. We’ve had a breakthrough. For the first time ever, we’ve been present on a planet when the Shiva took over. We’ve sent back information about what happened.

“We don’t have an end. We barely have a beginning. Here’s what we must do next. We must install organic copies of me on every planet along the front of the Shiva’s spread.”

Drake paused, realizing what he had just said. Those copies were going to disappear, every one of them. He was going to vanish, a million times over. But now there was a hope that some of the embodiments would not die. He might be transported to a personal Paradise — a dream life, but a perfect dream from which the copies might never waken.

“We also,” he went on at last, “have to put arrays of independent sensors on every planet. We must install caesuras on or near each planet, ready to operate whenever a reality shift signals that the Shiva have appeared. We must install on a ship near the caesura the equipment to produce millions of identical copies of all data, with the equipment to feed those copies into the caesura at the first sign of trouble.”

Equipment. That was one way to describe it. But the equipment would include copies of himself — and these copies, unlike the ones down on the planetary surface, were surely doomed.

“And when we’ve done all that” — Drake’s gaze, beyond his control, was drawn back to the display; it showed his other self, still holding Ana in his arms — “when we’ve done all that, and we have recorded the information from a thousand or a million or ten million worlds, maybe we’ll get what we need. Maybe we’ll find a way to fight back.”

Breakthrough.

Drake had called it that, but it was the wrong word. No torrent of information flooded in from other worlds on the path of the Shiva expansion. No sudden insight explained everything.

What came was a slow dribble of isolated bits and pieces, an image here, a paradox there; confirmation of a