EXCEPT AS PART OF HIM.
TWENTY
HE WOKE. And all over the Galaxy, the shape of the worlds changed for the beings who inhabited them.
In Boston, on old Earth, a man in a red jumpsuit was overseeing the receipt of a valuable cargo of spices and fragrances from a planet in the constellation Canes Venatici when there was a sudden eruption of noise. The doors of the tachyon chamber crashed open. The militia on guard duty were borne back on a flood of glassy crab-creatures, their claws rattling like cast dice on the terrazzo floor. "But you are interfering with a priority shipment!" the man cried. They did not heed. They swept over him. Glassy pincers caught at the tuning controls. The slow creep of goods on the conveyor belt halted. Then the tachyon chamber clouded over with a smoke—a fog—a cloud of tiny creatures, and the swarm buzzed out, dancing like midges over a muddy creek. And another swarm. And another. "Why, you're Boaty-Bits," the man cried in exasperation. "You have no right here! Stop this at once!" But the swarms coalesced and danced toward him, diamond dust sprinkling the air. In a moment the man was covered with them, like a circus clown hit with a flour bomb. He stood rigid and helpless as the swarms came on, and came on, and came.
In another part of Boston, the Crystal Maid knew her destiny had come. She was not truly a she, or even an it, but merely a part of a great dispersed whole, once a star- borne seed, edited to ease her freedom of movement as she led the other seeds on this new colony world. She had no personality, nor even self. But she knew her task. She stood raptly at the edge of the Common, listening with all her senses to the mind-song of the sprouted seeds as they scuttled across the face of this world. She gave thanks to the distant, deeper drone of that greatest mind whose servants had planned her, and created her, and dispatched her on her way. Beside her, the autochthon Tupaia, temporary ally, discarded tool, cried out in astonishment; she paid no heed. The song of a million seeds on a hundred million worlds flowed through her. She was in touch with the infinite. She was the infinite.
In Lawrence, Kansas, on the same unimportant world, it was harvest time at the catfish farms. But when the workers arrived with their nets, the things that splashed out at them from the ponds were not whiskered and filmed, but huge, crystalline, clawed—and very numerous.
Very nearby, in the city of Tokyo, Japan—only half a world away—a frantic man named Kazuo Noritamo reached the 80-meter level in the great tower. It was being evacuated—heaven knew why—and the observation deck was crowded with frightened tourists hurrying down. Noritamo knew better. Down was where the danger was. He peered through the slanted panes, at the people around the amusements and rides, forty young girls in blue cloche hats with gold bands, a fat bald monk chanting into his begging bowl. They had not yet panicked. But they would. He ran up the steps to the high-speed elevator; no one was there; he got in and pushed the button himself, panting with both exertion and fear. The 250-meter level was deserted. He ran to the window, for once careless of the dizzying height. In the temple grounds at the base of the tower, white-capped police were trying vainly to stem the oncoming march of the glassy crabs, their shells streaked with the oily waters of Tokyo Bay; the police batons did not stop the crabs, did not seem even to annoy them. They were coming. He was trapped. There was simply nowhere to go. He was alone at the top of the tower, and as he peered down he saw that the enemy was close. The foreshortened tiny figures on the roof below were now still as statues in a sculpture court, every one of them suddenly limned with a steel-blue frosting of metallic dust, all faces raptly upturned to the sky, or to him. The rattle of the elevator door behind him made him turn, glad for the company of another escaped human. —It was not that. A dazzling cloud of steel-bright motes boiled out of the opening door to show that he had not escaped after all.
On the flimsy moon of a gas-giant planet—still very near; less than a hundred light-years away—a colony of collective beings felt the pulse of the Overmind. They were not like bees, nor even like any insect; they were not even related to the Boaty-Bits, nor had they become a part of the galactic congress of races, since their planet had been missed. But they were bioluminescent aerophytes, tough-walled hydrogen bladders cemented together in floating clouds a kilometer thick. They did not fear the pulse of rapture. It was the destiny that they had never expected, but recognized and accepted at once. They welcomed it.
In the slushy seas of an ice planet, a creature like a pale, lean whale felt the shock of an amputation. He was the owner of a Purchased Person on Sun One. His creature had been stolen without warning. He burst from his pearly home in the sea-bottom sludge and drove straight up, twenty kilometers and more, to breach the surface and leap into the dense, chill air. It was no use. His panic was justified. Out of a great lens-shaped cloud of luminous violet, three crystal creatures in the shape of deltaforms dove toward him like javelins. The creature saw them coming and dived to escape, but they followed, as fast in water as in air, and as sure. There was no escape.
On a damp, hot world in a distant spiral arm, three great flying creatures, soaring between a halogen-enriched pink cloud and an angry, oily, scarlet-glowing sea, dodged savage strokes of lightning. They did not fear the lightning as much as they feared the winged crystal shapes that steadily, remorselessly pursued . . . and always gained.
On a small planet under two ruddy suns, a creature that looked like a headless centaur was operating a compact excavator. He was almost alone. Most of his crew had drifted away, part of that epidemic folly that had transformed so many of his race to idlers—his race did not call them "Kooks." It did not matter much, because the excavation here was easy enough. The surface was a coarse, dark sand., very promising for the minerals that fed his kind. He cut through a wiry gray mosslike growth that bore tiny, powdery flowers of crystal and set out his arrays. A core drill brought up samples of the dark sand. Seismographs probed for deeper data. A tiny antenna, unfolding like an inverted parasol, transmitted the data to his people's central store. It was all going well, until his assistants came back, the faceted patches that served them for eyes alight with a sudden rapture, their forms surrounded by a dusting of diamond-bright tiny collective creatures that rose and swarmed toward him.
On the T'Worlie planet Nglinn, one of the greatest and oldest of T'Worlie scientists, danced away from his instruments with a sharp turpentine-and-lemon scent of joy. For half a long TWorlie lifetime he had sought to find a zero- mass tachyon, the particle whose predicted properties offered an immense new range of communication and transport—in vain. But now the search was over! Without warning his instruments registered a sudden flood of them, in the trillions of trillions, the strongest pulse they could count! He spun to his stereostage to inform his assistants. They did not answer at first—and when they did the oldest and best of them, all five eyes glowing with an unfamiliar ecstasy, cried out in the compact T'Worlie language a single word. The nearest English equivalent would be: "HE is come!"
And the rapture overspread the Galaxy.
It reached tiny planets and huge, hot worlds and cold, the creatures that lived in slow, sullen dust clouds in the wake of exploded supernovas and in the chromospheres of stars. It reached and possessed a conjugating mass of Sheliaks in the depths of their home planet, and transformed them; it was spelled out in drumbeats on the stark, dry world of the Scorpians. It did not affect every world, but most. It did not strike every individual, or even the majority. But hardly a race failed to find some of its members seized with the passionate touch of an Overmind, or to feel the grip of tiny collective beings swarming out of their tachyon stations, or to retreat in the face of the armies of crystal creatures that boiled from their seas.