In other respects the mander body was not at all froglike. His skin was dry and soft to the touch, covered with material like feathery mole fur. His two mouths were not in his head, where the sense organs were clustered, but one on each side of the torso beneath the breathing apertures. His brain was centered between them, deep in the interior of his chest and protected by rings of bony plates. Nothing could reach it that would not kill him first.His embodiment was not, according to Milton, the most intelligent life-form on the planet Lukoris. That position was claimed by a monstrous flying predator known as a sphexbat, a creature that bordered on self-awareness and rode the permanent thermals around Lukoris's crags and vertical precipices, landing neither to feed nor breed. The sphexbat's young developed within the body cavity of the parent until one day they were ejected, to fly or to fall to their deaths.

Lukoris's mutation rate was high. The survival odds for infant sphexbats were no better than 30 percent.

Drake was interested in the animals mainly because they were interested in him-manders formed one of the sphexbat's preferred forms of food. An immortal body was immortal only against aging. It could still be killed. He, of course, could be reembodied, but death by sphexbat sounded unusually unpleasant. The sphexbats did not swoop down on their prey and carry it off, like the Earth raptors. First they made a low-level run across the surface, blowing a fine cloud of neurotoxic vapor from glands at the base of their wings. Vegetation cover was not enough protection.

Any mander inhaling the fog did not die, but it felt the urge to crawl into the open and there became paralyzed. The sphexbat returning at the end of the day for its second run found the prey alive and conscious but unable to move.

The victim was scooped up from the surface and consumed at leisure. The sphexbats maintained live larders on high rock ledges, and a mander-or Drake- might wait there awake and immobilized for many days.

Danger from sphexbat attack was a potential problem on the surface, but that's not where Drake intended to spend most of his time. No one could live alone and conscious for a million years, in his own body or any other, and remain sane. Drake would mostly be at the bottom of the swamp with the other manders, ten meters down, dormant and safe from attack. His species estivated regularly.

Events on the surface would not be ignored. A network of instruments would record data until Drake's return to the surface. That information supplemented the observations of the orbiting ship.

Drake expected to return to the surface for Lukoris's winter, but not every time. Once every hundred or thousand years he would be above ground for a few months, to check the instruments and to conduct a planetary survey. Changes that occurred too slowly to be noticed in real time might jump out at him if he saw the planet as a series of snapshots, glimpses caught at widely separated intervals.

First, though, he needed a baseline from which to measure change. He must understand Lukoris in all its parts. He would travel around the world and observe as he had never observed before.

Drake sighed, and said to himself, Why bother? Why am I doing this?

But he knew the answer to that. He set to work.

Prior to Drake's arrival, Lukoris had been the home of a thriving colony for hundreds of millions of Earth years. When the great amalgam of panic-stricken humans, computers, composites, and all their trappings fled the path of the Shiva, they did not take everything. Drake was the inheritor of a whole planet and of the former colony's technology.

That technology was useful in Drake's own survey of Lukoris. The planetwide data net showed a divided world of extreme horizontals and verticals, of sluggish seas and swamps encircling near-vertical mountain ranges. The mander body could not survive the rarefied air of the highest peaks without equipment, but Drake had to know what was going on there. Who could say where and in what form the Shiva might choose to appear?

He spent the first long winter roaming the planet. In person and vicariously with the help of miniature remote sensing units, he traveled the three-thousand mile ice river in the south, visited the tropics where summer water boiled to steam and only sulfur-loving bacteria could survive, and surveyed the northern badlands where the sphexbats were evolving their first primitive art, drawing stylized animals in blood on sheer rock faces. The sphexbats circled about his equipment. They were cautious and they did not attack at once, but they called to each other constantly in what was clearly a developing language.

Drake stored every image and sound and smell in his body's augmented memory. He omitted nothing, and he did not hurry. There was plenty of time. If he missed something this winter, there would be a thousand more chances to pick it up.

Finally it was time for the first estivation.

His body started the process automatically, exuding a transparent liquid that hardened into a tough semi-permeable membrane. Small amounts of oxygen and water could be imported, and waste products expelled. As the shell solidified, Drake's body began to dig. Beyond his conscious control it dived and tunneled its way through a thick green ooze that thickened steadily with depth.

The process was natural to the mander, but not to the consciousness trapped within it. Drake felt that he wasdrowning in total darkness, surrounded by viscous fluid that thwarted any effort to save himself.

When it finally became clear that he was not drowning, that the body he inhabited could take prolonged immersion in its stride, he was not much comforted. This was not the way he had imagined his future: trapped in a swamp, in an alien body, the single human intelligence within many light-years with nothing to look forward to but solitude. And he must go through this many thousands of times.

His body was beginning to turn off, powering down for the long night. Drake fought against it, trying to dictate the course of his dreams. He didn't want to be here. He wanted to fight his way back to the surface, to signal the watching ship to pick him up. He wanted to go home to Earth. He wanted time turned back, to the happy days of youth and love and music.

He wanted Ana . . .

But that, of course, was why he was here. That was why it was right for him to be here. He was on Lukoris so that he could, someday, be with Ana again.

Someday I will be with Ana again.

As his body cut back the oxygen supply to the brain, Drake clung to that thought. He curled into a ball and went contentedly to sleep.

The pulse of Lukoris's seasons was slower than Earth's. With little tilt to the axis of rotation, summer and winter were dictated only by the planet's movement along its twenty-year eccentric elliptic orbit.

Drake's modified body had been programmed to sleep through fifty of those long cycles. Awakening at last one early winter, he crawled from the depths and waited for his shell to crack. When it had crumbled enough to give him freedom of movement, he tried to begin his inspection. His mander body would not let him do it. It insisted that he eat and drink, ravenously, breaking an eight-hundred-year fast. Only after that was he allowed to turn his attention to Lukoris.

At once he thought that he saw changes. The instruments assured him that it was illusion. The variations he seemed to observe were purely psychological. He was adapting to the mander body, and as he did so Lukoris's bottle-green swamps and flame-colored precipices became beautiful to him.

It confirmed the wisdom of coming here long before any Shiva influence might be expected. The adaptation was a transient effect, something that would settle down after the first few estivations.

He continued his careful monitoring and recording of plant and animal populations, diurnal temperature variations, surface and subsurface geology, solar radiation levels, and ten thousand other variables. All measurements went up to the orbiting ship. From there they were transmitted by S-wave data link to headquarters, half a galaxy away.

What was important? Drake did not know. Maybe everything, maybe nothing.

There was one unplanned and unpleasant incident, when he became too interested in a threadlike plant that wove great mats on the swampy surface and lured big animals there. When the threads broke, apparently by intention and all at once, the animal sank into the ooze to die and provided nutrients. Drake was not heavy enough to be at risk; but he was far from any cover when the sphexbat came sweeping on its first run of the day.

It saw him and changed course. A cloud of white vapor came drifting toward him as it passed overhead. The only possible escape route was downward. Drake plunged headfirst into the ooze with his mouths and eyes tightly closed, wondering if this was merely a different way of dying. It was still midwinter, much too early in the year for the mander to estivate.

The slime of the swamp was cool on his skin. After a few minutes Drake realized that he was not suffocating. His body could absorb enough oxygen through its epidermis to keep him alive, provided that he did not move much.

He waited for seven hours, almost half a Lukoris day. The neurotoxin cloud must be given enough time to be absorbed into the swamp, or to dissociate chemically in the presence of sunlight.

When he wriggled back to the surface through the sucking ooze, the sphexbat was right in the middle of its collection run and only a couple of kilometers away. It swooped noiselessly toward Drake on twenty-meter pinions, the capture scoop already open for pickup. It was within thirty meters when it saw that Drake was upright and moving, rather than lying immobile on the mat of the swamp. Twin maws hooted a two-tone call of surprise and rage. The sphexbat banked and veered away.Ten seconds later, at a higher altitude, it returned to pass immediately overhead. A pair of black eyes ahead of the scoop stared right down at Drake.

What would it tell its fellows on its return to the high cliffs? That some variant mander had arisen, with a new technique for self-defense?

Maybe, in Lukoris's far future, oral history around a sphexbat tribal fire would tell of a time when a strange creature had appeared on the surface, invulnerable to the paralyzing neurotoxin on which all hunting depended.

Drake told himself that he was fantasizing. Lukoris did not have a far future that was continuous with the past and the present. The arrival of the Shiva would be a singular point on the time line, a moment when future and past were discontinuously connected.

He returned to his careful survey of Lukoris in all its aspects.

On and on.

Winters continued, one after another after another, until Drake no longer saw them in his mind as unique events but as a long continuum of insignificant change. If summers seemed more memorable, it was only because he remained awake more rarely. They formed unpleasant data points, when most of Lukoris experienced conditions of heat and dryness that the mander body could scarcely tolerate. Drake felt that he had to supplement the recording instruments on the surface and in orbit by ground surveys in summer as well as winter, but it was not easy. The changes made to the mander body could keep it awake, but at some level it knew a deeper truth. As temperatures rose, every cell of his body longed to be ten meters belowground, at rest in the cool and quiet dark.

On and on.

Year after long year, winter after winter, summer after summer. The possible arrival of the Shiva took on the overtones of ancient myth. In his mind the final confrontation became Armageddon, Ragnarok, Dies Irae, the Fimbulwinter, the Last Trumpet. It would never happen. They would never come.

Until, suddenly, they did.

Drake rose from his dark hiding place one morning, as he had emerged five hundred or a thousand times before. The rains had ended and the air was pleasantly cool. Even before his protective shell was gone, he knew there was a difference.

Not just a single, minor change, but changes everywhere.

He looked up. The late-summer sky of Lukoris was usually a smudged yellow. Today it was pristine blue, barred with a delicate herring-bone pattern of pink and white clouds. The air was clear, and in the near distance Drake could see hills. They were not vertiginous heights that rose sheer from the encircling plain, but gentle slopes dappled with light green vegetation and small copses of rough-barked trees.

There had never been trees on Lukoris. Only low-growing plants covered the endless swamp and formed dense mats on dark watery flats.

Swamp.

Then where was the feel of cool ooze?

Drake looked down. He should be seeing algal cover and swamp pads, not the short, springy grass and clumps of blue wildflowers that stretched in front of his feet. And those feet should be wide and gray and webbed, not pink and five toed.

Drake breathed deep. He smelled lavender and thyme and roses.

He looked up and saw someone walking to him across the springy carpet of grass. Her hair shone gold in the sunlight, and she moved with the old familiar grace of perfect health. She did not speak, but her red lips smiled a greeting. When she moved to embrace him he knew just where he was.

His long search was over. He was in Paradise, and the only person that he had ever needed or wanted was here with him to share it.

The mander body had been modified in ways deliberately withheld from Drake. During all his days and years onLukoris, a continuous report of his condition and actions had been beamed without his knowledge from the augmented memory module of his mander brain, up to the orbiting ship and thence to far-off headquarters.

When the anomalous behavior began on the surface, the copy of Drake that existed in electronic form on the ship did not pause for analysis or explanations. He did not try to send out a superluminal signal, which had failed so often with the Shiva in the past. Instead, he activated the caesura.

It had stood near the ship, prepared and waiting for this moment, for more than half a million years. Into the caesura, one after another, went ten million separate copies of every observation ever made of Lukoris, right up to the final second.

The whole ship and its copy of Drake would go into the caesura also. It was almost unbearably tempting to wait and try to learn what had happened-Drake seemed to be down there on the surface of Lukoris with Ana, miraculously returned to him.

But waiting was too dangerous. Drake in orbit had to assume that the Shiva would soon know about and be able to use anything that was left behind, just as they had used other planetary defenses against humanity. He and the ship must follow the data packets. Immediately after that the caesura itself would close.

In the milliseconds before the ship entered the caesura, Drake had an idea as to what the Shiva might be and do. There was no time to attempt another message. All he could hope was that Drake Merlin back at headquarters would draw the same conclusion.

Ten million packets of data had left the ship-moving not into space, where they might be intercepted, but out of space completely. Not even the Shiva should be able to track something through a caesura or prevent its passage.

Drake knew the odds. They had been calculated by the composites billions of years ago. There was one chance in 969,119 that any single data packet would reach its destination at headquarters. There was the same small chance that the ship and Drake himself would arrive there. In all other cases, close to certainty, Drake would vanish completely from the universe and experience death in some unpredictable way.

But ten million independent packages of information about events on Lukoris had been sent into the caesura. That changed the overall odds completely. The chance that one or more of them would reach headquarters was good: in fact, there was only a chance of one in thirty thousand that no data packet at all would make it home.

Those were acceptable odds. Certainty would have been nicer; but certainties in the universe were rare.

Drake waited, calm and surprisingly content, for the caesura to swallow up the ship and send him with it into oblivion.

Chapter 23.

"There's trouble in the wind, my boys, There's trouble in the wind.

Oh, it's please to walk in front, sir, When there's trouble in the wind."

At last.

After hundreds of millions of years and a hundred billion tries, Drake and his team had something to work with.

Of course, the something made little sense. The group in the War Room was puzzling over eight copies of data records, all identical, that had been delivered through the caesura.

"It's perfectly consistent with the statistics," Cass Leemu pointed out. "There was a ten percent chance that we'd getexactly eight copies, but anywhere between six and fourteen is high probability. I'm afraid there's no sign of the ship that was orbiting Lukoris."

She did not need to say "the ship with Drake on board."

"The statistics may make sense." Tom Lambert was studying one of the displays. "But nothing else does. Look at this."

The record of the final minutes on Lukoris existed in two forms. One of them showed events as seen by the sensors scattered around the surface. The other was Drake's own perception as received through the mander embodiment.

According to the surface sensors, Lukoris was much the same as it had been in the previous year; or, for that matter, the past half million. Swamps, broken by clumps of scrubby plant life, stretched away flat and dull to the horizon, where mile-high scarps of rock loomed skyward. The sky above them was the unchanging sulfurous yellow of late summer.

But Drake's view . . .

"What is he seeing!" Milton said. "And what does he think he's doing}"

They were looking through the mander's eyes as it walked forward across a sward of healthy turf and spring flowers.

Milton, who had never seen old Earth, was justifiably puzzled. But Drake, seated in the headquarters' War Room, knew where he was. He was having trouble answering Milton, because he also guessed what was coming next.

The mander embodiment had become human in form. It was walking barefoot on the Sussex Downs, one of Drake and Ana's favorite vacation spots. She had been standing by a hedgerow, admiring a thrush's nest. Now she turned at Drake's approach and smiled a greeting. Spontaneously, without a word, they embraced.

In that first ecstatic moment, Drake in the War Room forced himself to look across to the other display. The sensors showed the mander, unchanged in form, standing motionless before a foot-high bulbous plant with spiky silver leaves.

"Freeze!" Drake said urgently. And then, to the others, "You know the earlier records. Is that"-he indicated the little plant-"new to Lukoris, or to this region? I don't think I've ever seen it before."

"It appears to be new." The others, using the power of their composites, could answer almost at once and simultaneously.

"But what is the significance?" Par Leon asked. "It is nothing but a plant."

"I'm not sure. Look for more of them."

That analysis was also finished almost before the command was given. All of the Galaxy's computing power was available when Drake asked for it. With such resources the problem was trivial. Using the spiky-leaved plant as a template for a matching algorithm, the global database of Lukoris was scanned and analyzed, every day of every year since observations first began.

"They're all over the place," Cass said. "This size or smaller. But ten years ago there were none. They've all sprung up in the past few years. Do you think they are real?"

"I'm sure they are. It's the other scene that's a false reality." Drake hated to say that. He wanted what he had seen to be true, and he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes away from the image of Ana. "I think the plant is able to create an illusion in the mind of an intelligent being."

"Why intelligent?" Par Leon asked.

"Imagination needs intelligence." Drake gestured again to the first display. The mander stood motionless before the plant, while other animals wandering the swampy surface apparently took no notice. "There must be a certain minimum awareness, a level of intelligence before a mind can be made to imagine something other than what it receives through its senses."

"Like hypnotism," Melissa said. "The subject sees what she is told is there."

Mel Bradley scowled. "Hypnotized by a plant?"

"Do you have a better explanation?" Drake zoomed in on the mander. "Look at me. Cass can probably suggest athousand ways in which an electromagnetic signal, or a scent containing the right chemicals, could affect the functioning of the brain. Remember, the plant doesn't change Lukoris. It just persuades the subject to see an alternate reality."

"But what reality?" Milton sounded confused. "It surely can't impose its own reality on someone."

"No." It did not surprise Drake that he knew what was happening when the others did not. His understanding was exactly proportional to his pain.

"Not its reality," he went on. " Your reality. It allows you to see, and to imagine that you live in, the reality that you desire beyond any other."