In time, the Seedees grew used to the idea of how their lives would change. They came to accept the presence of a real, scientific God in their lives, to work with it and to accept its goals as their own. With their help, it grew and changed. Centrum, the Starseeder's artificial brain, their lineal descendant, squatted in its great ship and manipulated the Seedees to its own ends, to the ends that its makers had instilled in it in the early years of creation. It bent them to the will of the Grand Design. The ship was modified and enlarged. The ideas that Centrum had had in all the idle years while the Seedees evolved were implemented. The ship was filled with the tools of a vast trade and all the beings who had lived below embarked. All was ready. For the first time in a hundred million years the photon drive was ignited. A great spear of coherent electromagnetic radiation lanced out into space, a spear capable of destroying: whole worlds, and for a while the star system wasilluminated by its light. Slowly at first, then ever faster, the ship accelerated away, bent on the second phase of its mission. Left behind, Mother Ocean still teemed with life, but intelligence no longer brightened her deeps. The ship went on and on, cruising among the stars for more than a billion years. The aeons passed. Centrum directed and the Seedees worked. They worked and, in the end, were absorbed into the processes of the artificial brain. The ship stopped here and there, intent on its task. Whenever a methane world was found, the ship tarried for a little while and simmered with the effort of building up excess population. When it left, it left behind a little colony of Seedee life and, in orbit, a duplicate ship containing an immature brain, a young god.
Whenever they encountered one of the increasingly common silicate worlds, a special task unfolded. Matter gathered from the hydroxyl clouds was set upon the path of its natural process but accelerated. Centrum directed, and the Seedees built the little ships then. . . . That is what they were, tiny replicas, in water and carbon, of the great ship itself. Made from the worshiped substance of the ancient, dead Star-seeders, they contained a tiny, simplified brain, the immortal genes of an immortal mind, and even submicroscopic versions of the Seedees themselves. All of it was imbued with the single command: replicate. Evolution would come on its own, from the driving forces of Chance. Changes, when they occur, accumulate.
It went on and on, for ages more, while irreparable damage built up within Centrum. With the passage of time, the Seedees grew weary from their labor and began to die off. The ecosystem of the ship began to falter and then the downward progress was swift. The pressure of a building entropy pushed at them, and all things must run down, come to a final halt. The Brain might outlast the universe but not so the ship and Seedees. They were tired, giving in to the Weltschmerz that afflicts almost all organisms. They died.
Dreaming Sun was the last of his kind. A thousand years had passed since he had last coupled with a fading soul,trying to extract the last bits of its selfhood from a thin flow of oil. He was alone now with Centrum, old, and crippled with the accumulation of unsought change, yet the Brain was reluctant to absorb him. It too feared loneliness, for it remembered that time between the death of the Starseeders and the rise of the Seedee worlds. Without the methane beings, the Grand Design could not be pursued. .
. . The ship had been steered to a rendezvous with an old colony world, hoping for a new crew, but the navigation was faulty, the star had been missed. The programs were deteriorating and there were none to effect repairs. The ship drifted.
Dreaming Sun sighed, a long string of meaningless pheromonic bubbles. Weary, weary, weary . . . Centrum saw that the end was near, could be put off no longer. Time to extract one last bit of meaning, make a last update on the dying data file. Come to me, it said. Dreaming Sun committed the last act of defiance of his species, a requiem for the Seedee people whose duration on the void had been so overruled by voices from the remote past: he opened his valves, expelled his oil, and dissipated, abandoning his God at last. His shell drifted away on the currents of the methane sea, empty, and Centrum was alone.
The ship drifted, rudderless, forever, and Centrum, trapped within, began to dream its endless dreams. Mass began to accumulate. The lander lost its hold and fell into an orbit. The fuel pods dropped away and followed. A little nebula formed around the ship as it drifted through a matter-rich region of space. It became a little star, with icy moons for planets. The ship was trapped then, the lonely Centrum hidden within. Under endless layers of gas and stone, the detection mast could no longer see the sky. It drifted, and Iris was born.
Were there other ships? That is unknown. There might have been. There were many worlds.
Times past still bubbled from within.
Deepstarlay in the grappling hold of Camelopardalis, the immense, Jupiter-bound freighter that would hurl them on the first leg of their year-long journey to Neptune. There wereten now, Temujin Krzakwa having joined them at Gamma, in full flight from the wolves of the Lunar tyranny. They waited, while engineering processors counted down.
Brendan Sealock sat in the common room of the ship's CM, staring out through a deopaqued wall at the blue orb of Earth seen from geosynchronous orbit. The Moon was also in view, a smaller, duller orb in the same phase, much farther away. What am I doing here? he wondered. I'm leaving almost everything that means anything to me! It was far worse than the day he'd left New York to go live with Ariane. The magnetism was almost unbearable now. Am I crazy? It was too late to turn back. He would have to spend more than a year with these people, en route to Triton. I must be!
The engineers reached their zero point. Camelopardalis fired up its engines and lit up the sky with a fiery glow. The Earth began to shrink in response and Sealock felt madness setting in.
It was over, not because the memories, the stories, had come to an end but because the damaged programming of Centrum had exhausted its capabilities.
Sealock felt himself floating, borne on the bosom of a great warm ocean. He heard the whispering of its waves, felt the warm currents of its thought rushing through his body. It rustled softly in the depths of his mind.
Come to me, it said, with an upwelling surge of loneliness. We are one. Sealock rolled gently in the comforting cradle of his past. He luxuriated in the happiness of a long-awaited homecoming.
He rolled to its rhythms. . . .
Come to me, it said. . . .
And he lost consciousness for the last time. . . .
They awoke, eight stunned individuals who had been filled with lifetimes, ages, in what was only a few fleeting moments. Ariane Methol opened her eyes and felt the tears drying on her cheeks. "Good God," she whispered. She turned to look at the others.
Temujin Krzakwa was slowly pulling the induction leads from his head. The enormity of it filled him. He could think of nothing meaningful to say, but, finally, "I don't think we can get him back. It's got him...."
Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, Demogorgon, put his hand over his mouth and gave a dry cough, almost a sob. He said nothing.
Elizabeth Toussaint closed her eyes, overwhelmed by an experience that made Downlink Rapport, the thing she had so long feared and avoided, seem as nothing. "Then we can't do anything for him?" Harmon Prynne pulled off his circlet, feeling a need for silence welling up within him. What sort of people were these? he wondered. For the first time he'd seen the real inner being of another person, an experience made all the more important for its having been the feared, hated, mystifying Sealock, and he was appalled. And yet . . . there was a real person there. How did the thing in Sealock differ from the thing in Prynne?