The easiest part seemed to be the creation of a chain of command. He needed to worry about just the first level. Even so, he learned within minutes that he could only interface with a composite if it simulated an individual with whom he was familiar and comfortable. That narrowed the options enormously; especially since any kind of Ana simulation was out of the question.

First, though, he had to select a command headquarters. That wasn't hard; he had returned to consciousness so often through the ages in the little villa overlooking the Bay of Naples and Tyrrhenian Sea, it was starting to feel like home.

He fixed it in his mind, furnished for his own comfort.

Then it was time to define his principal assistants. Tom Lambert assured him that all he had to do was think of the person, and the composites would handle the rest. Tom didn't say how, and Drake didn't ask. He just set to work.

Tom, of course. And Milton. The Servitor had abandoned the original wheeled sphere and whisk broom of many billions of years ago, but it was the form most familiar to Drake. Milton might as well stay in that shape. Cass Leemu, who had tried to teach him science so long ago-and failed-would be his chief scientific adviser. And Melissa Bierly.

He wondered about that choice, until she appeared at the table. She was not the woman he had last met, sane and contented and the lover and companion of the cloned Ana, but the mercurial and mad Melissa as she had been at her first creation. War was a form of insanity. Drake needed an element of madness. He could see it now, in those brilliant sapphire eyes.

Trismon Sorel and Ariel appeared briefly, but they would not hold their shapes. It was Drake's own mind, rejecting them for its own reasons: either he did not know them well enough, or they did not fit his present needs.

He was not happy with the two who completed the half dozen. Par Leon had appeared first, as unwarlike as a human could be. Maybe that meant he was close in temperament to Drake, who needed him for that reason. But then there had to be a balance.

Drake called on someone he hated. Mel Bradley had been the scourge of his childhood; short, hyperactive, hotheaded, ready to fight over nothing. He had sneered at Drake, calling him a girl and a soft-head sissy who liked stupid poetry.

In their one confrontation as eleven-year-olds, he had given Drake a black eye. After that Drake went out of his way to avoid him, without ever quite admitting that he was scared. Now Mel, adult and wary, glowered at Drake from the other end of the room.

Six assistants. He looked along the polished table and considered the result of his efforts. How much reality was there in any of this? The others had been created out of his own stored consciousness, plus the combined contents of the data banks. All of them (including Drake himself!) consisted of nothing more than a random movement of electrons.

But hadn't that always been true of thoughts in every brain, whether organic or inorganic, wetware or hardware?

And if Drake was not fully satisfied with his chosen assistants, hadn't that always been true of all leaders? He remembered what the Duke of Wellington said, after he reviewed his own poorly trained and ill-equipped troops and before they went into battle: "I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but by God they terrify me."

Drake never expected to see the rest of his own "troops." All instructions would go out, and all reports come in, through the chosen six. That might be a problem. Old wars had been plagued by officers who restricted access to their generals and told them only what they wanted to hear: "The fort is impregnable. ..." "The morale of the men remains excellent. . . ." "Strategic bombing will weaken the enemy to the point where their resistance is impossible. ..." "The adversary's losses far exceed our own. . . ." "One more increase in troop strength will turn the tide in our favor."And the slaughter had rolled on.

Well, with luck, the composites would have forgotten how to lie. They should have no interest in telling Drake only what they thought might please him.

But in fact, none of this could ever please him. He told himself, over and over, why he was doing this: only in order that, someday, he and Ana could be together again.

The next task was to divide up the workload among his chosen helpers.

"You, Cass." Drake wondered how long it would be before giving orders came easily to him. At the moment he hated it. "I want you to produce the science and technology summary for me. I have to know what's available now, because that's going to be the basis for our weapons development. Milton, you will be the expert on alien life-forms, anywhere in the Galaxy. Par Leon, I want you to learn exactly which stars have been affected by the Shiva, and tell me which ones are now in most danger. Mel, you are in charge of offense. That means you'll be planning counterattacks. You ought to love that. Melissa, you'll be my expert on the Shiva themselves-everything that humans know, I want to know. Tom, as my general support, you are to remain flexible, ready to tackle anything that comes up.

"Any questions?"

"Yes." It was Melissa. Her reply stopped Drake cold. It seemed to him he had been perfectly clear and he wasn't expecting questions. He frowned at her. "What's the problem?"

"I'm confused. It seems to me that my task is already finished."

"You have a report on the Shiva?" Even with the uncanny computing speed of the composites, that seemed impossible.

"In a manner of speaking. And so do you. We know all there is to be known."

She didn't sound confused. She sounded sure of herself, the confident, competent, all-seeing Melissa that Drake had known of old. He groaned inwardly. They had hardly begun, and already he sensed trouble.

Melissa was right. Her briefing took many minutes, but the main conclusion could be summarized in seconds.

One stellar system, far out beyond the main galactic rim, had ceased to communicate with all other humans thirty-three million years earlier. That was the first. The change had been noted, but it drew no attention. Composites and civilizations often chose to go their own ways, even as Earth had gone its own way and withdrawn from the solar system back in what was now considered the dawn of history.

Over the next several thousand years, half a dozen more systems fell silent. They were in the same remote galactic region as the first one. Still, no one was worried. They were presumed to be part of the same social experiment.

A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand; not until a hundred thousand colonies were silent did humanity sit up and take notice. Before any action was taken, the number had grown to over a million.

Even then, the superluminal S-wave queries suggested more curiosity than worry. They were polite requests for a reply: "Are you all right? Is there anything that we can do for you?"

To that question, and to every other direct and indirect form of approach, the colonies sent the same reply: nothing.

Humans, composites, ships, sub- and superluminal signals: whatever was sent did not return. A multimillion-year silence had begun its spread across the Galaxy.

Melissa was detailing that spread, system by system, millennium by millennium, when Drake interrupted her.

"All right, I agree with you. The role that I assigned you makes no sense. So let's change it to this: Since we don't know anything about the Shiva, you and I will make it our job to find out."

He knew that he was on the right track. By some means or other, by skill or subterfuge or treachery or outright murder, they had to collect information about the Shiva. He was glad that Melissa spared him the obvious question: How?

Drake no longer had organic components. His consciousness had no need for food or rest. There was no reason he could not work around the clock, every second of every day. So was it only his own stubbornness that imposed a circadian rhythm on his actions, including "day," "night," "sleep," and "meals"?He thought not. He had a logic for his behavior: since this era had failed to solve the problem of the Shiva, his own value, if any, must lie in the fact that he was a savage throwback to the earliest human times; the more that he could retain of those archaic traits, the more likely he was to offer something new (or old) and different.

He set up his own working regime. He held "breakfast briefings," "working lunches," "strategic planning sessions"

each "afternoon," and "end-of the-day wrap-ups." His preference was for small groups, not more than two or three present at a time. He insisted on taking breaks from everyone, when he could be alone to think things over.

The huge mass of composites, nineteen layers deep, did not like that approach. He could feel their impatience as an invisible pressure transmitted through his chosen six. He sent back his own message: / do things my way, or not at all.

It took nerve to stick to that, after his first meeting with Par Leon and Cass Leemu.

"It's thirty-three million years since we had the first evidence of the Shiva," Leon said. "The current total of known colonies that have become silent is between ninety-seven and ninety-eight billion. I do not include in this the colonies in parts of the Galaxy far from the troubled region, which have withdrawn from interaction presumably for other reasons. If you would like the numbers exactly . . ." And, at Drake's impatient shake of the head, he continued, "They suggest the extinction, or at least the silencing, of almost three thousand colonies a year. But that number is highly misleading. The process began slowly and has been growing exponentially. In the past year, as you like to measure time, contact has been lost with almost seventy-five thousand colonies. Two hundred a day, one every seven minutes..

"Here are their locations." The great spiral of the Galaxy glowed in the air before them. A curved bite had been taken from it. On the edge of that dark sector, thousands of dots flashed orange. They highlighted a thin boundary between light and dark.

"And now look here." The orange dots vanished, to be replaced by another set a tiny step closer to the galactic center. "These, according to our best estimates, are the colonies where the Shiva may be expected to appear next."

It seemed a minute change. Measured against the whole Galaxy, it was; but Drake was not misled. Seventy-five hundred stellar systems or free-space colonies, lost from all human contact.

"What are the composites doing about it?"

He didn't expect a useful reply, and he didn't get one.

Par Leon just rubbed his chin and looked unhappy. "Doing? What can we do?"

"Well, at the very least, you can warn the colonies."

"But they already know. They have known for hundreds or even thousands of years."

"And they're just sitting there, doing nothing?"

"Not at all. Many have moved, closer to the galactic center."

"Fine. So you keep moving-until a few million years from now, when the Shiva occupy the whole Galaxy. Where will you go then?"

Drake turned to Cass Leemu. "I know it's going to take a while to inventory all of human technology, but we can't wait.

We have to do something now. Take the list you have so far and pick out the ten devices with the highest energy density. I'll want to look at the whole list, but don't wait for me. Get with Mel Bradley and send superluminal S-wave messages to the colonies that are next on Leon's list. Tell them to make sure those top ten devices get built as soon as possible and are ready for use. Tell them we'll be sending another S-wave message very soon, showing how to make the devices operate as defensive weapons against an invasion from space."

Cass didn't hesitate. "The list is on the table in front of you." It was suddenly there. "It's ready for your review, in interactive nested form. You can ask for more detail about any part of it."

She and Par Leon vanished. Had Drake ordered them to do that? It didn't matter. When dealing with the composites he was never sure who was doing what.

He turned to Cass's first cut at a list of useful technology. He had given her a few ground rules that might sort devicesinto an order of probable value: anything that involved huge amounts of energy, of any form; anything that performed a large-scale manipulation of time and space; anything that could be used to act as a shield to divert objects or radiation; anything able to perform planetary or stellar modification. Finally-he realized that his own ignorance might make him miss the most important defenses of all-he had asked Cass to include anything that she thought would be totally incomprehensible to Drake.

There seemed to be more of that last category than of any other. Humans, in composite form and working with or without their inorganic helpers, had become superhuman by the measures of earlier times. There seemed nothing that they could not do. They had ways to turn off and on the light of stars. They could create black holes in open space, or use existing ones for energy sources. They could build free-space colonies the size of the whole solar system. They could send message-bearing accelerated wave fronts a hundred thousand light-years, clear from one side of the Galaxy to the other, in hours. They could shield an object against any attack, from fusion bombs to neutrino beams.

Any attack. Why couldn't they shield against the attack of the Shiva? Surely, in all those millions of years since the arrival of the Shiva in the Galaxy, some colony of the endless billions that had fallen silent would have tried the shield as a natural protective move. And it must have failed. Drake worried again about the nature of his unseen adversary.

Most mysterious technology of all, humans had found a way to create a type of space-time singularity never found in nature. There was no word for them that Drake recognized, but they were translated to him as caesuras. They were described as cuts in a Riemann sheet of order four, but that told him very little. He visualized them as slits, mailboxes in smooth space-time, capable of admitting material objects. In fact, they had been developed in an attempt to bypass the light-speed limit for solid matter. From that point of view they were a "failed" technology. They did not achieve their objective in a controlled way. One time in a million (once in 969,119 attempts, to be precise) they would send an object instantaneously to the desired destination, even if it was in the most remote regions of the Galaxy. There was another theoretical possibility, even less likely, that the object would be hurled to some unknown destination much farther off in space and time; in all other cases the caesura would throw the object out of the universe completely.

"Do you mean out of the Galaxy?" Drake wondered if he was misunderstanding what he was seeing and hearing.

"No. Out of the universe." The interactive list replied in Drake's own voice.

"Throw them out of the universe to where?"

"That remains unresolved. Most probably, to a universe like our own, perhaps to one with different constants of nature. These conjectures are based on theoretical analyses only. Many probes have been sent through a caesura, but none has ever returned."

"Is it possible that the Shiva are sending our colonies through a caesura?"

"It is quite impossible. We know from numerous observations that the suns and planets in the silent zone remain exactly where they were before. They merely refuse to respond to us in any way. When we send a probe to them, it remains active and returns signals all the way. After its arrival at the planet, it falls silent."

Drake fell silent, too. He was persuaded; the Shiva were not making use of the caesuras. But as for the caesuras themselves . . .

He did not understand them, but he could not get them out of his mind. He called for Mel Bradley. In the short term, the colonies would have to be protected with whatever was to hand. He was not optimistic about that, when the shields had not worked. What could penetrate a total shield?

He would ponder that question. And in the meantime-which might be a very long time-he and Mel would work on another option.

Chapter 18.

"Lord of our far-flung battle line"Waiting.

Drake considered himself an expert on waiting. What else had he been doing for the past six billion years but waiting and hoping?

This time, though, it was different. This time he could not drift dormant through the ages; this time he must remain conscious, day after day, waiting and watching and wondering.

Cass Leemu and Mel Bradley, with Drake's guidance and close direction, had taken existing technology and adapted it to provide planetary defenses. Superluminal signals had been sent out to the colonies; not only to the ones that according to Par Leon were in the most immediate danger, but to the next line back.

The main focus was going to be on that second line. Drake had made the decision and kept it to himself, knowing that he dare not discuss it with the others. His action was going to doom billions of thinking beings to extinction. The composites would not be able to handle such an idea. Drake, however, had no choice. If he were right, this was going to be a war of long duration. Before he could produce a long-term strategy, he needed to see exactly what happened when the Shiva became active in a region; then he needed time to build a wall of defense, observation posts, and lines of communication. Except as information sources, he had to write off planets that would probably fall in the next year or two.

The outgoing messages to the colonies gave precise instructions on fabricating and installing the defense systems.

Within a few months, the superluminal S-wave messages came flowing back. Defenses had been built and tested on thousands of worlds. Shields were in place. Fusion, fission, cavitation, and particle beams sat prepared for instant use.

The colonies were nervous, but they claimed to be ready for anything.

That worried Drake more than it heartened him. In every resurrection he had believed himself ready for anything; each time, he had been astonished by events.

What else could he do while he was waiting? The little villa had become a headquarters for galactic action. He prowled it, night and day. The living room was now a War Room for the whole Galaxy, where reports from a billion suns were sifted, analyzed, and summarized by the multiple working layers of composites. The placid view of the Bay of Naples had long since gone. In its place was an ever-changing display of the "battle front." Drake thought of it that way, although there was still no sign of conflict; only reports from the colonies and regular messages from the probes that were observing them from a safe distance. A copy of Par Leon was on each of those probes, transmitted as S-wave signals and downloaded to permanent storage as part of the resident composite.

Everything was ready. Ready for anything? Drake watched and wondered.

And then the silence began. One of the front line planets stopped transmitting.

It was almost too much for that copy of Par Leon. The returning messages from the probe took on a hysterical overtone. "We can see the planet, it looks just the same as it always has. There's no sign of damage or change. But they don't reply! We keep sending, and they won't reply!"

Underneath Par Leon's words, like a carrier wave, was the suppressed terror of a billion more voices. Drake itched to be part of the probe composite, to see things at firsthand. But that would break one of his prime rules: he had to remain separate and aloof, a primitive throwback to earlier times uncontaminated by the gentler present. Otherwise he would be no more useful than a hundred trillion others.

"It's all right, Leon. Keep calm. How far from the planet are you?"

"Two and a half light-hours."

Drake called for a conversion to a measure more familiar to him: nearly three billion kilometers. "You're probably safe. Is that the best image you can send us?" The War Room display showed a grainy and fluctuating picture of a gray-green blob.

"The best we can do from this distance. We're observing at our highest magnification."

"It's not good enough. I can't see any detail at all. You have to take the probe closer. But don't take risks. Turn around and run if you sense any kind of trouble."

"Trouble? Do you think it's safe to go closer? We sent hundreds of messages to them, and they don't reply anymore."

"You said yourself, the planet looks just the way it did before it went quiet."It sounded like an answer to Par Leon's question, but it wasn't. If Drake had to guess, he would say that any probe approaching a silent planet was not safe at all. It was in terrible danger. But he could not mention that to anyone. If he was to save trillions, he might have to sacrifice billions. He had to have information.

He told himself that he was not sending anyone to a real death. The composite represented by Par Leon would still exist here, even if every probe copy was annihilated. And yet he recognized that as a bogus logic. The death of a clone was a real death-to the clone.

Drake asked to be informed when the probe came within ten light-minutes of its planetary goal, and turned his attention elsewhere. Other messages were streaming in from other places. It was more of the same bad news: planets and their colonies, unaffected in appearance, were vanishing from the universe of communication. They were becoming part of a great and spreading silence.

He measured the total time for fifty more cases of signal loss: a little less than six hours. Allowing for statistical error, Par Leon's estimate of two hundred lost worlds a day was spot on.

Drake did not try to examine each situation in detail. Melissa and Tom would be doing that, and they would provide their analyses later. He turned his attention back to the first world. The probe was within ten light-minutes. While it flew closer, Drake called for backup planetary data.

This was one world in a triple dwarf-star system of over a hundred. And it was the only one that was even remotely habitable, with native life-forms and an oxygen atmosphere. That gave it a certain distinction: planetary orbits in multiple systems were normally too variable for life to develop, sometimes sweeping in searingly close to one of the stars, then wandering off for cold years in the outer darkness. This world had been lucky-its name translated to Drake as "Felicity." It had hovered in the middle region, not too close and not too far, for the billion years that life needed.

That's where its claim to distinction ended. The native life had not progressed beyond cyanobacteria, a coating of blue, green, and sickly yellow that covered the surface of the single ocean and most of the land. For humans interested in planetary transformation, though, Felicity with its surface water and thin oxygen atmosphere was 99 percent of the way there. All that had to be done was a stabilization of the orbit, a boost to the gravitational field, a buildup of the atmosphere, and the introduction of multiple-celled organisms. Trivial. The work had been completed half a billion years ago. Felicity had become a typical member of the teeming galactic family of inhabited worlds.

And now?