How? He had no idea.

He called on Ana to give him strength.

Chapter 25.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments."

The first one is the most difficult.

As Drake repeated this to himself he tried to believe it. His revenant self had been dormant when it was retrieved from eight-hundred-thousand-year isolation. It still wore the snakelike organic form considered best for the surface of the planet Greenmantle.

Drake faced his first decision: Should he transfer the mind of his other self to electronic storage, before the interaction began? The technique to do it was routine, and information transfer would surely be easier and faster if they were both electronic. But would the change offer an additional shock that made the revenant's awakening harder to bear?

It was better to do it the other way around, at least for the first meeting. Electronic downloading and merger could come later. Drake arranged for his own transfer to the same snaky form. When he awoke he occupied the body of a legless animal with vestigial wings on its sides and a triplet of prehensile tentacles on the blunt head.

He gave the signal to awaken the other, and wondered: What am I going to call him, whenever in my own mind I must distinguish us ?Again, the answer was obvious. If he is to suffer minimal shock, he has to be Drake Merlin. If anyone changes his name, I must do it.

Slitted green eyes opened and stared at him.

"Hello." His own greeting came out as a complex waving of the three flexible proboscises.

The other Drake regarded him warily but said nothing. He felt sure he knew why. Drake Two was thinking, Has the planet fallen to the Shiva? Is this some manifestation of them, designed to trick me and destroy me?

"Drake, don't go by appearances. You are among humans again. You were retrieved before the Shiva reached your planet."

There was a long, thoughtful pause. The response, when it came, was not quite what he would have provided. The revenant's isolation had produced changes.

"Who are you?"

"I am you. Another version of you."

"Prove it. Tell me something that no one else in the universe knows. Something about me that no one but me could possibly know."

That no one else could possibly know. It took a few seconds, then he had it.

"Our teacher was Professor Bonvissuto."

"Known to me, and also to all the data banks."

"Surely. In our second year with him, he entered us in a statewide contest. We won, mainly because a big part of the competition was to improvise on a given theme."

"Also recorded, I suspect, in the same data banks." Drake Two must suspect where this was heading, but the snaky tentacles gave nothing away.

"But we weren't really improvising at all. When we had breakfast in a hotel near the concert hall the morning before the competition, we were given a table that hadn't yet been cleared. The previous diner had scribbled a series of notes on a napkin, then crossed them out. We noticed the last one, because it had the same three ascending G-minor notes that start the third movement of Mozart's Fortieth Symphony, and also the third movement of Schubert's Fifth Symphony.

We started to wonder what you could do with the theme, and we doodled around with it off and on for the rest of the day.

"When the judge offered the theme on which we were to improvise, we realized who had been sitting at the table before us. Naturally, we did a spectacular job and astonished everyone. We felt like cheats, but we didn't say anything to anybody-not even to Ana."

Drake Two was gesturing agreement. "I am persuaded. So what now? Why was I returned?" And then, with a wave of comical puzzlement that Drake understood exactly, "I am Drake-but what do I call you?"

"Call me Walter, if you have to. You know how much we hated our given name. I must give you an update on events.

There have been great changes; mostly for the good, but we have bad news too."

He outlined the progress in understanding the Shiva, and the effect that would have on society's need for Drake Merlin. At the end of the explanation, his other self gave the gesture of grim assent.

"If you are no longer needed, I am in the same position. So are all the other versions of us. We are dangerous atavisms-until the next time that the galaxy needs us."

"Which may be never." He regarded his companion self. Given his experiences, he was comfortingly normal. He had known that already, since the responses were close to his own responses. Which suggested another step. "There will be countless billions like us, returning from service beyond the stars. They will not all be as balanced as you. Even so, they must be welcomed, provided with explanations, and restored so far as possible to normal function. Will you help?"

If Drake was truly Drake, the answer could not be in doubt."Tell me what I must do."

"Some of our returning selves are likely to be hugely unstable. I am not sure if I-or you-could suffer such an interaction alone and retain our own sanity. We need to reinforce each other. We need to combine our strength. We need-"

"-to merge. I understand."

"But not in this form. I am not sure that is even possible. It must be accomplished when we are in electronic storage."

"Of course. Proceed."

No need to explain, no need to persuade. Of course not. Not unless a man had to persuade himself.

Already his vision had begun to blur. Uploading and merger became simpler when the mind was fully quiescent. As his consciousness began to fade, he wondered.

What would he be like-they be like-when the merger was complete? Was he a caterpillar, ready to change to a chrysalis before transforming to a butterfly? It would not be like that. In the caterpillar's metamorphosis there was no combining of materials. Two gametes, then, joining to form a single zygote in the fertilized egg? That was closer, except that his parts were-or had once been-absolutely identical.

As he drifted off into limbo, he hit another simile: he was like identical twins; born together, parted for a long, long time, and at last reunited.

Drake awoke and recognized at once that his groping comparisons were worthless. He had no sense of a merger. He would never believe that he had once been two separate individuals, except that his memories beyond a certain point in the past were duplicates. He had been eeling his way through the swamps of Green-mantle and at the same time directing operations in the War Room. In his mind's eye he looked to the heavens and recalled two starscapes of vastly different skies.

But he had also been right. His mental strength, stability, and resilience had never been so great. For the first time, he understood why humanity chose to exist as elements of a composite. If the merger of two felt like this, what would a multitude be like? Omnipotent and omniscient?

He was about to find out. A thousand returned copies were waiting for his attention. Millions more were on the way.

But even when those were all merged to a single Drake Merlin, it would be no more than a beginning.

The first one is the most difficult.

Drake recalled that optimistic assessment and wished that it were true. This was not the first, nor even the hundred and first. But he was fighting for his sanity and his own existence.

There had been no warning. An organic revenant, seemingly no different from ten thousand others, had agreed to merge into shared consciousness. The upload to electronic form had been routine. The merger began. And Drake felt within him the white-hot flame of insanity.

Alone, he would have had no chance. It was his extended self, protected by the finite transmission times of even S-wave communication, that provided an opportunity for defense.

An opportunity, but not a guarantee. The force of madness was strong beyond belief. A single command was repeated over and over. It ordered every part of Drake to forget the external world, to sink with it into an autism that knew nothing beyond self.

But one part of Drake, farthest off in space, was able to resist. It offered its urgent warning: If we move inward upon ourselves, we will never return. Remember doomed Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. Look outward. Turn outward.

The struggle continued. Drake became oblivious to external time and place. That was exactly what the insane component wanted. Only a continuing, intrusive, distant voice-look outward, turn outward-provided the lifeline that returned Drake to external reality.

At one point he thought he saw an opportunity to destroy the component, erasing it completely from all stored memory forms. At the last moment he realized that was a trap. He was the copy, and the copy was Drake. By acceptingits annihilation, he would be endorsing the idea of self-annihilation, and ultimately he would guarantee his own dissolution.

Look outward, turn outward. He continued the fight. At last, little by little, his dispersed self found a purchase on the lost mind. He turned it, screaming and struggling, to face the united force of ten thousand components, each delivering the same message.

It was hopeless. The revenant was obdurate, irrational, impenetrable. And at the moment when he came to that conclusion, a critical stage was reached. Without warning, the phase change took place. All resistance ended and the madness dissolved. The mad mind, broken and bewildered by past insanity, could not explain what had happened.

Drake soothed it and welcomed another self to the expanding society of the composite. At the same time, he made a solemn vow: Never, no matter how many components were added to his composite self, would he again assume that adding the next one would be easier.

It ought to be a moment for rejoicing. Drake had kept strict accounting, and this was the millionth component to return for rehabilitation. He was getting there, slowly but surely.

It was a pity that the millionth had to be such a case, one that made any idea of celebration impossible. Perhaps it was the gods of ancient times, punishing hubris in their own way. Drake had felt his power growing as the number of his components grew, and he had exulted in it. He spanned a million stars, and there was nothing he could not do.

Except this.

He examined the profile of the new revenant. This Drake had suffered a unique and terrible fate. A hundred million years ago, he had assumed a local organic form and been landed on a world where the Shiva were expected. He had remained there for half a million years, and at last been rescued and returned for possible rehabilitation.

Sometime during that half-million years, a parasite had entered Drake's body without his knowledge. For native life-forms, the organism was actually a symbiote that improved its host's chances of survival. No native life-form was intelligent, so it was not important that as an accidental by-product, brain tissue atrophied in the presence of the parasite. The infected animal was still able to breed. Its life expectancy and reproductive capacity were somewhat improved.

Drake's intelligence had been housed in the brain of the native animal, with a slight organic memory augment. The decline had been too slow to notice, and at some point there was no intellect-or anything else- left to worry about.

The mind and memory of the returned copy had been downloaded to electronic storage, so that Drake's composite could examine it bit by bit. There was still something, the vaguest feeble glimmer of self-awareness. By no rational standard could it be called intelligent. And by no emotional standard could it be destroyed.

Drake initiated the merger with himself. The poor, damaged relic of the revenant had done its duty. It deserved the best that the composite could offer. Even if nothing at all was contributed to the intellectual power of the extended group mind, perhaps the millionth merger would add its iota of emotion and compassion.

And maybe the million and first revenant, or the billionth one, would experience the benefit.

Brooding over the abyss, Drake contemplated his growing self. He stretched across a million galaxies, adding to his numbers every day and every year. The threat of the Shiva to humanity was ancient history. Nowhere was there danger, nowhere was there conflict. The potential for his own growth was endless. He might one day occupy the whole universe.

And yet ...

Yet there was a feeling that something was missing.

How could that be? His task was complete. Every one of the components that he had sent out, on every planet once threatened by the Shiva, was fully accounted for. Every one that had not been destroyed in the battle had returned.

Over long aeons they had added to his extended composite. There was no way that he could have missed one.

So it was an illusion. Nothing was going wrong. Nothing was lost or forgotten, nothing could be.

Drake felt himself, for the first time that he could remember, at peace. At last he could relax.PART THREE Odyssey

Chapter 26.

"From out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may beat me flat."

Drake's memory of the final minute was clear and vivid. He had been standing at the ship's port, gazing down on a world below. It was almost one full day since he had been embodied, and now he was ready to board a lander and begin the descent.

He already knew the planet and the local skyscape. A wealth of information about both had been loaded into him during embodiment. But that was abstract knowledge. Now he desired the real thing: the feel of alien soil or sand beneath his clawed feet, the first breath of whatever passed for air, the sight of sun and moons and starry constellations diffused through haze and cloud and nighttime mist.

He took a last look down. The world was close to Earth type, and his embodiment reflected that: arms and legs and neckless head; three-fingered hands; a body able to walk upright rather than crawl or burrow or scuttle across a rocky seabed.

He turned to enter the lander, and in that moment the ship's control system spoke: "Shiva presence detected. Landing aborted. Caesura activated. Final entry commences in five seconds."

So soon? The ship's message had just told him that he was going to die. He had expected a long and lonely vigil on the surface, with only memories of Ana to sustain him, and at the end of it the arrival of a Shiva influence and an unknown destiny. Instead he would find oblivion within the next few seconds.

Since there was not one thing he could do about it, Drake stood perfectly still, watched, and listened. The caesura had already appeared. He could see a roiling spiral of darkness with a blacker eye at the center. A caesura was a slit in space-time, but this seemed more like a bottomless funnel, a conical swirl of ink and dark oil.

The ship was poised on the brink. Drake, knowing that his final moment of consciousness had arrived, thought of Ana. Now he would never see her again.

He squeezed his eyes shut. . . .

. . . and opened them. There had been a violent moment of disorientation in which his fractionated body twisted and spun in a hundred directions at once. But when that ended, he was still alive. All was calm. The port beside him showed no chaos, no blazing glare or stygian dark, nothing but peaceful stars.

Had the Shiva prevented the caesura from operating?

"What went wrong? Why didn't it work?"

Before he could struggle for his own answers to those questions, the ship was replying: "Nothing is wrong.

Everything has proceeded exactly consistent with theory. "

"Do you know what happened?" Of all improbabilities, this was the greatest: that Drake and the ship had been flung toanother universe looking exactly like their own. He stared again out of the port. The sky showed stars, gas clouds, and the faint misty patches of spiral nebulae. But the stars were in unfamiliar patterns, and the planet had vanished entirely. "Where are we?"

"Specifically ? I do not know."

"The caesura was supposed to annihilate us-to throw us into another universe. This looks like our universe."

"It is our universe. I have estimated the local physical constants, and they are the same within the limits of measurement. The probability of this occurring in another universe is vanishingly small. I am now in the process of measuring the global universe parameters."

"Do you know what has happened to us?"

"I have no proof, but on the basis of deductive logic I can make a strong inference. The operation of the caesuras follows an unpredictable statistical pattern, thus the outcome of any specific use cannot be predicted. But the probabilities have long been known. In almost every case, the caesura serves to eject an object that enters it into another universe. Once in a million uses, the caesura serves as an instantaneous transportation device to a chosen location. And sometimes, so rarely that we had assumed it would never happen in practice, the caesura may transport an object to an unknown place and time within our own universe. The evidence indicates that has happened to us. According to the records, this possible outcome was explained to you long ago. "

Drake remembered it-vaguely. It had been mentioned when the idea of using caesuras first came up; then he had ignored it, thinking of the caesuras only as weapons. But the Bose-Einstein Condensate that formed the ship's cooled brain forgot nothing, and its atomic lattice memory held millions of times as much information as all of Earth's old storage systems combined. The ship probably knew everything that Drake had ever been told, as a tiny subset of its database.