“As it is today.” The display froze and the lights came on again within the room, as Tom continued, “Except that it has not ended. The change continues, faster than ever.”

  A great crescent wedge had been carved from the display, cutting out almost a quarter of the whole disk.

  “The colonies vanish, without a signal.” Tom sounded bewildered. “If all the composites in the vanished zone have indeed been destroyed, billions of sentient beings are dying from moment to moment while we are speaking.”

  “What have you tried?” Drake had his own idea as to what was happening. It was obvious to anyone from his era.

  “We have tried many things. We have sent signals in that direction. There has been no reply. We have sent inorganic probes. We have sent ships bearing individual organic units. We have sent ships carrying full composites. Not one of any type has ever returned.”

  “Were your ships armed?”

  “Armed?” The puzzled reply was that of a society which billions of years ago had found aggressive impulses an impediment to progress. There had never been a need for them in the steady and peaceful spread across the Galaxy.

  “Armed with weapons, Tom. Able to defend themselves if they were attacked.”

  Tom Lambert’s image flickered and wavered, as though whatever was communicating with Drake had suffered a temporary breakdown. Terror bled in from the host of clamoring minds in the background.

  “They had no weapons.” Tom was steadying again. “There are no weapons.’ Even that concept has been relegated to remote third-level storage within the data banks. What are you suggesting?”

  “Something very simple. This galaxy is being invaded, by something from outside.”

  “But what?”

  “I have no idea. Whatever it is, intelligent or non-intelligent, it is deadly. Even if it doesn’t mean to do it, it’s doing it anyway. It’s killing you. You have to be able to defend yourself against its effects.”

  “We have no idea how to do that.”

  “I can tell you.” To Drake it was the ultimate irony. That he, a dedicated pacifist in his own time, with a hatred so strong of all things connected with warfare that he would not even compose military music on generous commission, should after uncounted eons emerge as weapons adviser to the whole Galaxy . . .

  “I have no idea what science and technology is available to you, and I doubt if I could ever understand it. But I don’t need to. I’m going to tell you what weapons do. And I’ll warn you now, you won’t like what you hear any more than I like telling it to you. For a start, let’s talk about what self-defense means. After that I’m afraid we’ll have to start to get nasty.”

  It came as a surprise, although it should not have.

  Drake was working with beings (with or without their inorganic helpers, he was less and less inclined to label them as “humans”) who could turn on and off the light of stars, harness black holes for energy sources, and build space colonies the size of planets. In some way totally mysterious to him they had even managed to bypass the light-speed limit for solid inanimate matter, creating odd space-time singularities known as caesuras to send objects at high speed to the most remote regions of the universe.

  For the composites, once the necessity had been accepted it was easy to produce devices of bewildering destructive power. The caesura singularities, employed as weapons, had the potential to throw structures completely out of known space-time. Drake saw the method demonstrated on whole uninhabited planets. They vanished without a trace. He did not understand the explanation that the bodies were appearing in some other universe, but he felt a strong foreboding of guilt. Without his guidance, these engines of destruction would not exist.

  Once they did, the second and more difficult phase had to begin: someone must be willing to use them. It became more and more clear that he alone could be that someone.

  There were other problems. Drake had originally assumed that Tom Lambert’s reluctance to discuss the passage of time was a deliberate desire to conceal information. Now he realized that he was dealing with beings who would without hesitation agree to spend fifty thousand years in a dormant and uploaded condition during a slow-speed trip across the Galaxy, often subject to considerable time dilation, then follow it by a period in which their electronic forms operated at a rate millions of times faster than that of organic components. In that environment, absolute time had little relevance to anything.

  But the consequence of that loss of time-sense had profound effects on what Drake was beginning to perceive as the “battle to save the Galaxy.” A ship, armed with its newly developed weapons, would set off for one of the “danger zones” where colonies were winking out of existence. Whether it succeeded or failed, news might not be returned to the Sol center of operations for more than fifty thousand years. It was also not at all clear what those ships were doing, if and when they encountered the unknown hidden force whom Drake saw as Shiva, the impersonal and ultimate Destroyer. No one had the slightest idea when to run or when to stay, when to defend and when to attack.

  Drake chafed at the lack of feedback, even as he resented his own role as military commander. Finally, and reluctantly, he accepted the only logical answer. He must force himself to accept a unique and worrying fate. He would be multiply downloaded, so that Drake Merlin—or a Drake Merlin—could be sent out to advise and direct on every ship.

  Some of them, he knew with absolute certainty, would “die” when the ship that bore them was annihilated by the Shiva. The other copies of him might learn of that death, but they would know it only abstractly.

  Would he then be alive, or would he be dead?

  Like many of the questions he had asked himself recently, it seemed to have no meaning. He decided that abundant duplication offered at best a prospect of unasked-for immortality, which for him had little personal appeal.

  As the ship came closer Drake Merlin looked out onto a barbecued world, a shrunken planet covered with a crisp black coating. He gave instructions to send those images back toward Sol. Moments after he realized that for some reason the outgoing signals were being inhibited, the ship that was carrying him flamed to incandescent atoms.

  Drake Merlin was traveling in the second of two ships, following at a safe distance behind the leader. They were in constant communication No matter what happened, the trailing ship would return across the Galaxy with full information.

  The ship ahead moved peacefully on, heading for a star at the very edge of the danger zone. Without warning, fire blossomed around it. It was gone, without a hint of an outgoing signal to say what had happened.

  The second ship turned at once. It was not quick enough. As the same fire moved to engulf them, Drake realized that he had answered at least two questions: Whoever and whatever was invading the Galaxy had to be sentient. And the Shiva were malevolent. There was no other explanation for a trap set to catch more than one ship.

  The pity was that no one but he would ever know what he had learned.

  It was information of sorts. Where a giant space colony had once floated in free space, the sensors now showed nothing at all. However, the nearest star, no more than a light-hour away, revealed subtle changes in its spectrum. There were more metal absorption lines than had been shown in the old records.

  Drake pondered strategy as the lead ship turned cautiously toward the star. He had been downloaded to both ships, and his two electronic versions had worried the problem all the way out from the galactic center. Something new was needed. Ship combinations had been sent out before, without success.

  When the first ship was within ten light-minutes of the star, the second one released a tiny pod. It lacked a propulsion system, but contained miniature sensors, an uploaded copy of Drake, and a low-rate transmitter.

  He hung silent and motionless in space, and watched the approach to the star of the two ships. The first one vanished in a haze of high-energy particles and radiation. The second turned to flee, but a rolling torus of fire arrowed to it from the place where the other ship had been destroyed.

  Drake reached a conclusion: the radio link was an Achilles’ heel. The second ship should have been at a safe distance, but after the Shiva had killed the first ship they had been able to follow the tiny pulses of communication between the two.

  It was the first meager shred of direct information about the Shiva that anyone had ever obtained. It told him that he had to be ultra-cautious in his own transmission. He began to send data out, warily and slowly, varying the strength and direction of the signal. Thousands of receiving stations, all over the Galaxy, would each receive a disconnected nugget of information. When he was finished someone else would face the task of time-ordering the sequence of weak signals, allowing for light-speed travel times, and collating everything to a single message.

  Drake sent the pulses out a thousand times, varying the order of the signal destinations. By the time he was finished three thousand years had passed and he had drifted far from the star where his ships had died.

  He had no propulsion system. Even now, he dared not risk a rescue signal.

  They also serve who only stand and wait.

  He waited. For another one hundred and forty thousand interminable years, he waited. The pod contained minimal computing facilities and no other distractions. There was absolutely nothing for him to do.

  At last he gave the internal command to turn off all systems within the pod. And in doing so, erased himself.

  If Drake had known what was involved, he wondered if he would ever have begun. He examined the large-scale map, and shuddered at what he saw. The region where human colonies were unaffected now formed no more than a thin crescent on the outer edge of the whole galactic disk. The rest, including the dense center, had been eaten away by the Shiva.

  And still he had no idea of their motives. Every attempt at communication with them had failed.

  But data about the Shiva had been trickling in over the eons, miserably slowly and in tiny fragments. Their vulnerability was at last becoming clear to him. You did not need to know why a flame burned, in order to extinguish it.

  If you were also convinced that the flame was alive and intelligent, however, you did need resolve. And the Shiva were certainly intelligent. That presented Drake with a terrible problem. Even as they died, the endless trillions of units and composites working with him shrank from the idea of killing any Shiva. It had to be he, in his uncounted downloaded versions, who must unleash the lightning.

  He was also forced to make sacrifices, creating tactical hecatombs that he dared mention to no one. His allies, every one of them, would try to stop him if they ever learned what he was doing. As he baited his traps with whole stellar systems, he knew that when those traps closed he would be a murderer on a scale never seen before in the whole Galaxy. He was incinerating billions, hoping to save trillions.

  And he finally forced himself to face another unpleasant reality: if all the Shiva in the Galaxy were destroyed, the task would still not be at an end. It was clear from the manner of the Shiva’s appearance on the galactic rim that they had come from outside. They could return at any time unless they were tracked down and eradicated at their original source. Before Drake’s work was complete, humans and their inorganic allies would need to pursue the Shiva, perhaps all the way to the edge of the universe.

  Drake sighed, and gave the command to send out another fifty million ships. Each one carried a new and more sensitive set of detectors for Shiva presence; each one bore the caesura generators, weapons that made the first ones he had used seem like a child’s cap gun.

  Each one guaranteed that two hundred billion more sentient beings, Shiva or human, would die.

  The fight had gone on forever. This was not the end, nor even the beginning of the end; but it might be the end of the beginning.

  Drake looked at the display, and saw that for the first time in eons the crescent of human control was no longer shrinking. Considered over a span of hundreds of millions of years, a slow oscillation of the boundary could be detected. The Shiva were advancing in places, but in others they were being pushed back or annihilated, star by bloody star. The idea of human survival—even of human victory—could be entertained as a possibility.

  And with that possible success came a new problem, of a completely unexpected land.

  Throughout the endless years of the battle, Drake had remained aloof. He would not allow himself to become part of any composite, organic and inorganic, within the interconnected webs of consciousness. Nor would he share his personal data banks with anyone or anything. His logic was simple and invincible: he alone was willing to make the awful decisions of death and destruction needed to defeat the Shiva. He dared not risk any dilution of that will.

  For what seemed like forever, versions of his individual self carrying that lonely resolve had been downloaded and sent out on the warships, to meet their fiery or frigid end at the edge of the Galaxy and beyond.

  With the Shiva ascendant it had been a one-way process. But now in some of the spiral arms, humans were beginning to hold their own. As they began their own programs of attack and pursuit into the space between the galaxies, and then on through other galaxies, some of the ships were actually surviving.

  And some were coming back. On board each of them was Drake Merlin; each one different, each with his own unique experiences, yet each undeniably Drake.

  He had held himself apart from all others. But how could he refuse access to himself?

  He could not. Drake at last entered a composite. It was, however, a unique composite in which some version of Drake Merlin formed each component.

  At first it was total chaos. His element selves numbered in the endless billions; he had long ago lost count of the number of times he had been downloaded, and the total constantly increased. Parts of him were close by, parts were separated from the rest by millions of light-years; some had been partly destroyed in combat, and had become maimed or incomplete versions of a whole Drake Merlin. All, without exception, were now different. Time and events had produced changes in form, perspective, even in self-image. Drake struggled to understand, to assimilate, to integrate, and to maintain or create a single personality among that teeming horde of selves.

  Through it all, the battle with the Shiva continued. Humans were at last winning. The need for direct oversight by Drake diminished. As the threat of the Shiva receded and the need for his continuous involvement grew less, Drake became increasingly consumed by introspection. He took less and less interest in any external event, unless it was directly relevant to a substantial fraction of his own components.

  However, those components were linked to other composites and to other data banks. They stretched out across the galactic clusters and the great rifts toward the edges of the accessible universe, and they told of an evolving and changing cosmos. The dust clouds had been consumed, the supergiant stars long ago exploded to supernovas or collapsed to black holes. Even main sequence stars like Sol were far along in their lifetimes, reduced from their bloated red-giant stage to tiny white dwarfs no bigger than the original Earth. It made little practical difference to Drake Merlin or the other composites; intelligence had long ago migrated to other dwarf stars, only a tenth of Sol’s mass. As available energy was reduced, thought and information collection was forced to operate at a reduced rate; but it went on. The slow-burning small red stars provided only a niggardly dribble of radiation, but their energy supply would be sufficient to permit mentation to continue for at least another hundred billion years.

  Except that it would not continue. It came as a shock to Drake when the news drifted into his network that the universe itself had passed a critical point. Remote galaxies, always showing a red shift in the past, now showed a slight blue shift. The microwave background radiation, almost infinitely diluted and cooled by the expansion of the universe, revealed a tiny increase in black body temperature.

  The Great Expansion was over. The long fall toward the final singularity of the Big Crunch was beginning.

  The news stirred within Drake a strange uneasiness. It brought back memories, so far removed in time that they carried no physical impressions. He had to sift, deep within his own oldest data banks, before he found them. Old information concerning the difference between an open and a closed universe had at last become of significance. As information on that subject flooded in, with it also came a searing guilt.

  He had forgotten his own most solemn vow.

  It was easy to offer justification for his oversight. He had been preoccupied with a battle for human survival, the greatest war in the history of the universe. There had been no time for any other focus. And after the struggle with the Shiva had reached the point where other composites could begin to handle it, Drake had faced what was in many ways an even more difficult task: the integration of his own diverse and dispersed self to a single personality.

  He could offer justifications for forgetting his vow; but he could not accept them. He owed to Ana what he had promised her so long ago: her original personality, as he had known and loved it during the only important years of his life, the short but precious years of their marriage.

  Somewhere, somehow, he had lost sight of the prime objective. Now it returned, stronger than ever.

  A closed universe. Why had that thought been the key to memories of Ana?

  By force of circumstance, many of Drake’s components had spent unnumbered millennia studying the technology of weapons developed for the battle against the Shiva. With that study had come an understanding of the science that lay behind the weapons. What had been so obscure to Drake in the distant past now appeared obvious to his extended being.