"Can you . . . turn it down a bit?" I cried out in my mind. "Dial back the damned signal strength!"

And astonishingly, the thunder receded.

Theseagullstrengthisseasonofdiscontentbutgoodcontentdialsonetwothreeseeme . . .

"Almost there," I hazarded. It was word salad. I could very nearly understand now. . . . "Slower, please! It's coming through too fast."

It'scomingthroughslowernow . . .

"Still slower. Please!"

It is coming through slower now . . .

"Perfect! Perfect! Hold it right there!"

I expected more words, intelligible at last.

What I got instead knocked me flat on the deck. I'm not sure even now if I was conscious, or lost in a mind-twisting dream, an intensely vivid hallucination unlike anything I'd ever experienced.

I was still hearing conversation, like far-off voices, myriads of them, and still just on the edge of comprehension.

What I was seeing, however, appeared to be a vast, red-violet mist-filled void.

And I was falling through it.

"Where am I?"

Where am I? boomed back in reply. I am where? Am I where? I where am? . . .

The red-and-purple-mist-filled Creation, but overhead it shaded to black, and beneath me, in the ultimate Deep, lay Night Absolute.

And then that Night exploded with billions of stars, stars of every brightness, every color, swirling and sparkling and streaming along in vast, surging currents . . . closely packed blood cells rushing along invisible arteries and veins, streams of stars following gravitational currents across and around the shoals and deeps of galactic space, a scintillating, pulsing, living dynamic of light and matter on a truly titanic scale. . . .

I seemed to merge with the flow, joining a current of fast-moving specks of light, only the individual specks, I now saw, were organisms, huge organisms. They must have been huge if the cuttlewhales I saw moving along those enormous arteries were, like their counterparts on the surface, each hundreds of meters long.

"Where am I?" I thought. I had the distinct impression that someone, or something, was listening in on my thoughts. Unless, of course, I was in the middle of a psychotic break and hallucinating my little heart out. One possible symptom in paranoid schizophrenia is the sensation, the feeling that someone is listening to your thoughts, eavesdropping on your innermost self.

I shut that train of thought off in a hurry.

But I did hear an answer.

This is the universe.

I seemed to be hurtling deeper into the streaming network of stars, billions upon billions of them. I tried to understand what I was seeing, tried to see it in my terms, not the terms of whatever was feeding me the vision.

It didn't work. "Do you mean your universe? Your experience of the universe? Or something else?"

The mathematical centers of my brain were being directly stimulated, I knew. In general, the right parietal region handles basic quantity processing, like figuring out which is more, three or five, while the left parietal takes on more precise calculations, like addition and subtraction. I wasn't seeing anything, not imaging it visually, but it felt as though numbers shifted and flashed and built upon themselves everywhere I looked. The math, it seemed, was as much an integral part of this picture as the image of moving currents and myriad gleaming stars. Some of it was connected to the images; there were, I realized without knowing how, more than 12 billion cuttlewhales moving with me through just this one stream. Other functions were far more complex and intricately interconnected, but had nothing to do with what I was seeing.

Or . . . did they? I'm not that hot in math; I let my in-head processors do the rough stuff, which for me is just about anything more complicated than two times three. But I knew, without knowing how I knew, that there was a process called Gdel encoding, that it was possible to assign a unique number to each and every item of information in the cosmos-items that were as diverse as the number two and the quantum wave-form equation describing every object in a solar system-with numbers derived from factored primes.

These Gdel numbers could be staggeringly large. But once you had such a number, you could manipulate it, extract information such as true or false logical values from it, and eventually retrieve the original information from it, if you had enough computing power.

The numbers need not be unique. Only the numbering systems of distinct sets were unique, with one set, say, for numbering cuttlewhales, and another for describing minute creatures entering the Intelligence's awareness.

And one set for encoding the language and the thoughts of one dust-mote creature that identified itself as Elliot Carlyle, with data sets nested within data sets nested within data sets, stacked to dizzying levels of complexity and subtle meaning.

I knew, without knowing how I knew, that Kurt Gdel had used Gdel encoding to prove his Incompleteness Theorems in 1931 . . . that even with the advent of the computer, most problems had required years of calculation time until the advent of quantum computing, that even now the system was limited in its scope simply because of the complexity of the more advanced calculations.

How was I knowing this stuff?

Ah. That was it. My own in-head AI, the artificial intelligence riding within my cerebral implant that's served as personal secretary and digital avatar and e-link facilitator was a part of the moving stream, a part of the implacable and cosmic awareness filling me and surrounding me and guiding me through that maze of light and shifting numbers. It was accessing data, lots of data, from my personal RAM.

And the intelligence carrying me was reading it.

This is the universe. . . .

Each individual sound of that phrase-or rather, the individual electrical signals moving through my brain that were interpreted as that sound-could be described as two numbers, frequency and wavelength. Those could be multiplied together, and become the factor for a prime number-two, say-and then all of those factored primes could be multiplied together. . . .

I watched it happen, felt the numbers opening, blossoming like flowers. . . .

The universe is all I experience.

"But . . . there are parts of the universe that are outside of your experience."

Where had that insight come from? It felt like I was being swept along with the river of mathematical understanding.

Truth . . .

Fear . . .

Save us!

"Save you from what?"

From . . . ending. . . .

And I saw in my mind's eye a new scene, a familiar scene overlying the red-violet and the streaming stars . . . Kari and me standing side by side on Haldane's mess deck, a few other Marines in the background, lost in the spectacular viewall image of GJ 1214 as we hurtled in past the mottled red star. Ahead, we saw Abyssworld, half ice, half boiling, red-illumined sea and hemisphere-sized storm, and streaming out behind it into the blackness of space, the faint, hazy wisp of cometary tail as the star blasted water vapor off from the planet's atmosphere.

And that image connected with an inner, nested set of data, an older set of data, and I relived in vivid detail a scene experienced and saved weeks earlier.

It was a memory . . . a memory of the docuinteractive. . . .

The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock's hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. "In many ways," he continued, "Abyssworld is similar to a comet . . . a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star."

"That can't be a stable configuration," I said. "It's losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away."

"Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don't have a solid dating system with which to work, but it's possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.

"Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet's size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead."

I saw Abyssworld hanging in space, its tail streaming away into darkness, its star boiling its oceans.

A dying world.

A cry for help.

Save us.

Overlying the images drawn from my own memory were other images, other sensations, and an impression that I was this world, the Deep of this world, far below in chill and unending Night. Increasingly, powerfully, I was aware of the world below, a world I experienced through the senses of myriad swarming entities hundreds of meters long.

Cuttlewhales, everywhere cuttlewhales, sinuous and ropy and as minute as teeming bacteria compared to the sheer bulk and volume that was me. The cuttlewhales, I realized, were literally parts of myself born from frigid, gelatinous ice, deliberately teased from the organic ice to serve as senses allowing me to access the cosmos, the totality of my underwater existence. I saw . . . mountains, smoothly rounded, compressed under vast pressure, translucent, glowing, layer upon mist-veiled layer, like an impossibly beautiful nebula hanging in the Void. I saw the streams of shining stars, sensed again the sheer depth and vastness of that scale . . . a mountain, a world of moving light, and realized that what I was seeing was not a hallucination born of stress or fear or lack of sleep or incipient schizophrenia, but the heart of the world, this world, itself alive and vibrant.

My perception rose from the translucent mountains of light and inner stars, accelerating, rushing up into blackness.

And eventually, blackness gave way to red-violet light, to unfamiliar hues and an intense, almost painful glare of sky. I emerged, and found myself surrounded by a distorted image that could only be the surface of GJ 1214 I as seen through the weird eyes of a cuttlewhale, a world of red water and orange mist and mountains of cracked and broken ice calving into the sea. A scene divided into six overlapping segments in a circle, and which seemed to show me the seascape ahead and the icescape behind and the sky above and the water below all at the same time.

My head ached trying to grasp it all.

I was the cuttlewhale, moving in sinuous ripples across a wind-lashed sea, moving out into open water farther and farther from the ice, as the wind grew stronger and the water grew hotter, as the bloated red sun with its spot-mottled face and magnetically twisted prominences rose higher and yet higher into the sky, searing the surface with unendurable heat.

The cuttlewhales rose in vast numbers from the safe, cool comfort of their genesis in the Deep, emerged into a fury of heat and near-vacuum, and observed as their bodies gradually scaled and crumbled away. And as the first melted, more came . . . and more.

And then the others came, a ship of strange, hard ice hovering in the sky, and creatures, other intelligences, moving on the ice.

I felt pain as the beings used weapons of directed energy against the cuttlewhales.

And the cuttlewhales responded in kind . . . and I realized that from their scale, the cuttlewhales literally could not tell the difference between Gykr and human.

Imagine a world.

The world is 34,160 kilometers in diameter, or 2.678 times the width of the Earth. At the center of this world is a solid core 12,000 kilometers-give or take a few hundred-across, very close to the size of the Earth. Likely, the structure is similar-a hot, innermost sphere of molten iron enveloped in a plastic mantle, the whole sheathed over by a thin crust of solid rock.

And above that crust, a liquid ocean 11,000 kilometers deep.

The top thousand kilometers of that ocean is liquid water. Below that depth, though, between liquid and rock, those insane pressures keep piling up and up and up, one full atmosphere every ten meters, and the water is compressed and congealed into something like slush, an amorphous exotic ice exhibiting Debye relaxation and odd electrical effects, a matrix of gelatinous fluid shot through with other forms of exotic ice, and veins and streaks and currents of heavy metals upwelling from the solid, hot planetary crust far, far below.

An organic exotic ice, amorphous and shot through with contaminants, a dirty ice that has evolved and developed over the eons to become . . . a brain.

A very, very large brain.

The adult human brain has a volume, very roughly and on average, of 1,200 cubic centimeters. Twelve hundred ccs of neurons and glia and distinct organs like the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hippocampus, of cortex and neocortex, of tectum and tegmentum, of dendrites and synapses. Twelve hundred ccs of quivering jelly containing, roughly, 100 trillion-that's 1014-neural connections.

The brain of the Abyss Deep had a volume of over 900,000 cubic kilometers. Make that 1023 cubic centimeters . . . or about 700 quintillion times larger than the brain of a mere human like myself. A single brain . . .

If its NCE, its Neural Connection Equivalence, was on anything like a human scale in terms of packaging, it contained 1020 more synapses than a human, something like 1034 neural connections in all . . .

What the hell did that mean in terms of relative intelligence? If humans had 10 percent or so more synaptic connections than the Gykr, which made them a bit slower on the uptake than we were, what did that say for a comparison between my intelligence, say, and that of the Abyss Deep?

In my mind, the word Deep had just shifted in meaning, from a general term for the extreme depths of the Abyssworld to the living being itself that by volume made up 76 percent of that entire planet.

Vast . . . mysterious . . . unimaginably ancient. And unimaginably smart, a truly superhuman intelligence that embraced an entire world.

And it was terrified of dying.

I am the Abyssworld Deep. . . .

Is Dr. Murdock correct? The Voice thundered in my mind. Is my world doomed, the ocean within which I exist to boil away so soon?

"Well, your world will dry up eventually," I said. "But that will still take a billion years, at least. Probably more." I couldn't be sure of the exact figure, and it might be considerably less-a few hundred million years? But still, geological ages . . . eons. . . .

I could feel it rummaging through my in-head RAM, possibly trying to judge what I meant by the term years.

I have existed for a billion years already. . . .

I felt . . . dizzy. In shock. As though my brain was muzzily firing on only a fraction of its usual go-juice. A being-a potentially immortal being-a billion years old, and as far beyond me in terms of neural processing power as I am above a single specimen of Staphylococcus aureus.

Was communication even possible, I wondered, with a being, with an intellect that vast and that powerful? Most of the intelligent species we've encountered so far-plus most of those explored through the agency of the Encyclopedia Galactica-are, like the Gykr and the M'nangat and the Qesh and the Durga, all at very roughly the same level of intelligence, of consciousness, and of innate mental ability. There were a few oddballs out there that were tough to evaluate-the Durga were a great example, with such an alien worldview that we hadn't learned how to really communicate with them in almost a century.

An ant runs across the bare toe of a human being, and causes the toe to twitch. Can that ant be said to be in communication with the human?

The Deep represented, I knew, an entirely different order of intelligence than the merely human. Could I truly be said to be in communication with it now? Or was I in contact with some minute subset of that near infinitely vaster brain . . . as the ant might be in communication with the nerve impulses that cause the skin of the human's toe to flutter in response to its touch?

I found myself thinking of god.

Of course, I wasn't entirely sure what I meant by that word. For me, the word god had always been a place marker for a rather vague, cultural concept, for something much larger, more powerful, more intelligent than me.

Well, the Deep qualified on that count, didn't it?

Okay . . . try this instead. There was the traditional, monotheistic Creator, the capital-G God, believed in by so many humans still as a kind of old, bearded father figure in the sky, all-seeing, omnipotent, omniscient, ruler of His cosmos . . . and yet according to human thought, straightjacketed by a peculiarly narrow mind, a human mind concerned with concepts like prayer and worship and the salvation or punishment of those humans who one way or another fail to meet His standards.

I had never been able to wrap my head around such a limited, pathetic notion of what a divine creator-being might truly be. Surely, that image of God had more in common with the Zeus of the ancient Greeks than with any purely spiritual reality.

In contrast, there were the multiple deities of Neopagans like my own family, of Wiccans and Dianics and the religious reconstructionists of Norse or Saxon or Greek traditions-idealized deities that were human, easygoing and undemanding, Earth-centered representations of fertility, sometimes contentious, often humorous, and perhaps best understood as the expressions or projections or facets of purely human psychologies. A popular theme in Neopagan religious thought was that we humans were evolving, through a succession of lifetimes, into gods ourselves.

And now I was facing within my own mind the physical reality of a deity utterly unlike either of those concepts, a physical being so far beyond me in mental scope and power that I would never, ever be able to fully grasp or comprehend it.

I felt . . . very small. Very slow. Very stupid. And very, very inconsequential.

Save us.

And it wanted my-our-help.

What, I wondered, did a brain 700 quintillion times larger than a human brain think about? How did it pass the eons?

What did it experience . . . especially when it evolved as a motionless layer ten thousand kilometers thick embracing the core of a world? The depths of the world Abyss didn't exactly offer intellectual stimulation, did they? Very cold and very dark and eternally unchanging, save for upwelling currents carrying warmth from the core, and drifting flecks of life, and nothing, nothing more for age upon age upon measureless age.

What had stimulated that sentience?