He regarded the stars outside with a new eye. "We are still in our own universe, but far away from where we started. Is it possible for you to take me back to headquarters? "

"It may be possible, eventually. It cannot be done quickly, for several reasons. First, this vessel is able to travel only at subluminal velocities. Extended travel must necessarily be slow. Second, the caesura can cause translation through both time and space. We are now within a galaxy older than the one that we left. That also suggests the passage of considerable time."

"What do you mean, considerable?"

"I have not yet determined that. It could be many billions of years. I will know better when I have completed my estimate of the universe's global constants. Third, I have already sought to detect evidence of superluminal signals. I find nothing above threshold. Therefore, we cannot be anywhere within our original galaxy, or else S-wave communication has been replaced by something else. Finally, I do not recognize any galactic spatial patterns, as I would if we were somewhere within the local galactic supergroup. We have traveled, at a minimum, hundreds of millions of light-years. The problem of discovering the location of our galaxy is formidable. Even if that were solved, the problem of reaching it would remain. "

A ship's brain was designed to be free of emotional circuits, including any trace of humor or fear. Now Drake wished it were otherwise. He could use support at the moment from Tom Lambert or Par Leon. But the ship's design was his own doing. He had not wanted others to be forced to face their own extinction, and perhaps to flinch. He was less lucky. He had emotion aplenty and enough intelligence to understand the implications of what he had just been told.

He stared down at his body, never used for its original purpose and now useless. It had been enhanced for what seemed a more than adequate life expectancy, at least a million years. For any point within his own galaxy that would have been more than enough. He could have endured until contact was established with other humanity or until an S-wave signal facility was reached.

Movement to the galactic scale changed everything. The home galaxy contained about a hundred billion stars, all packed within a flat disk a hundred thousand light-years across. The whole universe contained a hundred billion similar galaxies. The tiny misty patches he could see outside the ship faded to invisibility across more than twelve billion light-years. Each was an island of suns, from the densely packed galactic center to the fading edge of the outermost spiral rim.

Somewhere, far out there, his own galaxy endured. The desperate struggle to contain the Shiva continued. The suffering and terror of trillions of sentient beings were reduced by distance to a silent and ethereal dust mote of light.He wondered what was happening now. Were other copies of him, in other ships, at last making progress against the Shiva? Were the Shiva sweeping on, unstoppable, across the whole galactic disk? He would never find out. Even if he knew his destination and could head for home at once, his body would wear out and die before he had traveled a tiny fraction of the journey.

And if the search for the home galaxy had to proceed at random? Then a searcher would still be wandering through space thirty or forty billion years in the future, when the universe collapsed toward its inexorable endpoint of infinite pressure and temperature. That searcher could not be Drake or this ship. Long before the end, in less than an eye blink on the cosmic scale, they would be dust.

It was a moment for despair. The logical thing was to end it now, before continued existence brought more grief and longing. He was looking down at his new, flawless, smooth-skinned body, wondering how it could most easily be given a peaceful end, when the ship spoke again: "My defined actions did not extend beyond the point of entry into the caesura. I require new instructions. Can you tell me the nature of our future, and what activities you plan?"

A moment for despair. That much was permitted. Now it must be over. Someone depended on him- even if it was only a ship. He could not give up.

"You know the main criteria for stellar type and planetary orbits that encourage the development of life. Do you have instruments to determine the nearest and most promising stars that satisfy those criteria?"

"Certainly."

"What about the development of intelligent life?"

"Essentially unpredictable. I can make crude estimates, but with little confidence in the results. The ascent of a native intelligence depends on too many random events in the evolutionary process."

"That's what I was afraid you'd say. All right, I want a systematic survey and catalog of all stars in this galaxy likely to have developed life. Throw in your best guesses for the development of intelligence. Give each one a probability, and place them in order of our distance from them."

"That can be done."

"Another question: What is the programmed lifetime of this ship?"

"Given raw materials, it is indefinite. I contain instructions for repair, for maintenance, and if necessary for self-replication. My memory has quadruple redundancy to allow for quantum changes. As any component ages, it can be renewed. "

"How about me? I know there's a lab on board that can build a body to specification and download a person into it, because that's what you did to make me as I am. Is the lab still working?"

"It is working now. Since it is a part of me, it should continue to do so for the indefinite future."

"What about the other way around?" Drake, despite his determination to think positive, felt a tension he could not ignore. This was the key question. "Could you take me as I am now, and upload me from this body into electronic storage? And if you did that, could you download me later into another body, either the same or a different one? And could you do the same thing over and over?"

The pause seemed long, though it was probably no more than a second.

"What you ask was not in the original mission plan, but it seems completely feasible. The body for future download would need to be specified. Also, I could not go beyond two hundred embodiments without replenishment. If more were necessary I would require a planetary visit for the acquisition of more raw materials."

"I'm planning on planetary visits. In fact, I'm depending on them." Drake went again to the ship's port and stared out.

The nearby stars were the brightest things he saw, but they were like cells in a human body, tiny subcomponents of a larger whole. The power was in the galaxies, stretching out into space forever. "What's the average distance between galaxies, and how far away is the nearest one?"

"Galaxies average a little more than 4,300,000 light-years apart. Of course, they are not homogeneously distributed. ""Of course." The ship did not catch irony, but maybe it could be taught. Certainly, they would have time enough.

"And the nearest galaxy to this one is about seven million light-years."

Seven lifetimes for this body. But long before that he would go crazy. The only way to survive was to spend the time between stellar encounters dormant, in electronic storage. And the next time around he would insist on his familiar human form.

"There is another factor that I should mention. When you asked me the mean distance between galaxies, I gave you an answer that applies today. "

"That's what I expected."

"But if, as your other questions would suggest, you plan on searching for our galaxy of origin, another factor must be considered. The universe is expanding. The distance between the galaxies constantly increases. If our target world lies many billions of light-years away, then the rate at which it flies from us will be a substantial fraction of light speed. Our effective rate of travel toward it would be diminished. Perhaps greatly diminished."

"I see the problem; the Red Queen's race." Drake was feeling dangerously unstable. "All right. What can't be cured must be endured. How long before you can pick a preferred stellar target?"

"That has already been done."

"With life, or with intelligent life?"

"Both tables have been prepared. As I said earlier, little confidence can be given for anything involving the development of intelligence."

"We'll have to take that chance. Consider only systems with a better than ninety-five percent chance of having life, and a better than ten percent chance of having intelligent life. How many are there?"

"Between 120 and 250. It is hard to be more precise."

"How far to the nearest candidate?"

"Six thousand light-years."

"Take us there. And one other thing. You said you could not detect any sign of S-wave signals. Is that because they travel only a finite distance?"

"No. In principle, they have infinite range. In practice they follow an inverse square law between source and receiver. With the ship's on-board detection equipment, the signals become indistinguishable from background at no more than a few tens of thousands of light-years. That is adequate for signaling within a galaxy but not outside it. However, even the strongest and most tightly focused S-wave beam would be lost to our limited equipment within a hundred million light-years. That is why I am confident that we are nowhere within our original local supergroup."

"But you could do better with a better receiver. Do you know how to make one?"

"I have the specifications for much larger receivers-for receivers of almost unlimited size, that would be able to pick up superluminal signals from the far depths of space. However, their fabrication could not be done on board. It would call for a free-space facility, and much assistance."

"Don't worry about that for the moment."

Six thousand light-years to the nearest prospect. Seven million light-years to the next galaxy. One step at a time. There were endless billions of years ahead of them, time enough for anything.

"I now have other information, and it amplifies my earlier statements. I have completed my estimate of global universe parameters. In particular, I have measured the galactic red shift. The result of that is surprising: There is no longer any red shift of distant galaxies."

The ship paused. Drake was learning how its analytical processes operated. He waited.

"Assuming that we are still in the same universe, which I continue to believe, the vanishing of the red shift is highlysignificant. It means that the universe is halfway through its total lifetime, and the blue shift phase is beginning.

Within the limits of observational error, my best estimates of current epoch show that the initial singularity preceding the expansion occurred thirty-three billion years ago. The final singularity, the eschaton itself, lies thirty-two billion years in the future. "

Not endless billions of years ahead, then, but thirty-two billion. At that final point lay the Omega Point, the ultimate last hope for Ana's resurrection. Except that Drake did not want to wait that long. And he was busy with his own calculation.

"We've jumped ahead eight billion years!"

"It is closer to nine billion."

Eight billion, nine billion, thirty-two billion-Drake found the numbers too big to have any meaning. One step at a time. ' 'You asked about the nature of our future activities. I can tell you them. After we have finished speaking, I am to be uploaded to electronic storage- painlessly, please, if there's a way to do it. You will proceed to the chosen star system. Upon arrival there, you will make observations of life-bearing planets. If one of them offers evidence of an intelligent life-form with a working technology base, resurrect me. If not, select the next promising stellar target and continue the journey. Carry out the same procedures when you arrive there. If there is no intelligence or intelligence without technology, keep looking. Awaken me only for discovery of technological intelligence, or for an emergency that you are unable to deal with. Is all that clear?"

"You have left one important point unspecified. You order me to resurrect you when we reach a world that satisfies your criteria, but you have not specified a form for your embodiment. "

"True." Drake abandoned, reluctantly, his plan to spend the rest of the future in his old human form. "Give me a body that can survive on the planet. Better still, make it the same body shape as that of the intelligent life-form."

"What if there should happen to be more than one?"

"Give me the form of the one that seems closest to human." Drake regarded his body, so soon assumed and so soon to be abandoned. Was there a reason to remain in it any longer? Not that he could think of. It would be another six thousand years-at an absolute minimum-before he had any reason to be conscious. He must not dwell on that.

Think of it as a natural sleep/wake cycle, not as a time comprising the whole of written history before his own birth.

"I'm ready to be uploaded. If you can't make up your mind which form to use when you get there, because they're not anything like human, don't worry about it. Just pick one."

"With what criteria?"

"I don't mind. Use a virtual coin if you have to-but don't wake me up to call the toss."

Chapter 27.

Postindustrial.

Drake awoke slowly and easily. As soon as he was able to think, he knew that something had gone badly awry.

His body did not feel wrong-it felt too right. His blood ran like ichor through his veins, and his mood was giddily euphoric. He knew of only one way that such a thing could happen.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head, and looked down at his naked body. As he had suspected; he was in his own human form, a new and blemish-free version of himself. He was also aboard the ship.

"What happened?" The vocal cords had never been used before, but they were in perfect working order. He tried an experimental laugh. Whatever else might be wrong, the embodiment lab was in fine shape. And so was he. "Are you telling me that you found a planet full of humans who look just like me in another galaxy?""No. I believe that we have encountered an intelligent form, but it is certainly not human."

"So why did you put me in this body?"

"It was a default option."

The ship sounded as frustrated as Drake felt exhilarated. He needed to be careful. The brain transients produced by new-body residence had not yet damped themselves out. He could feel the wild mood swings. How long had he been dormant?

"What do you mean, a 'default option'? Tell me what's going on."

"Your instructions were followed to the letter. We flew to our first target star. One of its planets bore life, but it had not progressed beyond single-celled prokaryotes. There is no possibility that intelligence will develop there for several billion years. I therefore proceeded to the second target, twelve thousand light-years away. I could determine, from a distance of half a light-year, that the nature of the atmosphere of all the planets in the system was such that no life in any form that we know it could survive. Nonetheless, I continued and found on closer approach that life had actually come and gone on one world. It had never achieved intelligence, and it had died out as temperatures rose during the normal brightening and expansion of its main sequence primary.

"On the third world, fifteen thousand light-years away, there were large artifacts and all the signs of sometime intelligence. But the creators had been destroyed, apparently by their own actions. No other life-form had the potential for near-term self-awareness.

"On the fourth world-"

"Wait a minute. How many targets have we visited?"

"This is the one hundred and twenty-fourth. I saw no point in resurrecting you on any earlier occasion. You are not interested in extinct intelligence, nor in possible future intelligence, but in present intelligence. We have never before found evidence of that."

"And now you have?"

"I believe so."

"And how long since the search began?"

"We have been traveling for slightly more than two million years."

"Fine." Drake decided that he had become blase. Two million years no longer impressed him. To get his attention now, you had to talk billions. "So what's the problem?"

"When we were approaching the current target star, I examined it from far orbit and concluded that one of the planets was remarkably Earth-like. Its atmosphere told of the presence of oxygen-breathing life, and as we came closer I observed several characteristic markers of intelligence: long linear and rectangular surface features, modified river courses, patterns of nighttime lights, and cluster patterns supporting little or no plant life."

"That sounds right. Roads and dams and power and cities. Did you make detail scans?"

"I did so as we approached closer, images to the meter level of detail and beyond. "

"So you know the shape of whoever was doing all the work. Why didn't you put me into that form?"

"Had I been able to find such a form, I would have done so. As it is, I found it necessary to invoke the default option of your original shape for the embodiment." The wall in front of Drake became a display screen. "Observe. We are first looking from far away, on our approach orbit."

The scene was the whole planet, seen from space. The ball glowed a mottled red and pink, from its banded midsection up to the small circles of white around the poles.

"Are those water-ice polar caps?" Drake had the irrelevant thought that he was looking at a gigantic Christmas tree ornament. He was bubbling over with excess energy, and his mind was ready to accept strange images.

"Correct. The mean temperature is that of Earth during one of your planet's warmer periods.""I can't see much from this distance."

"Have patience. The images that you will soon see derive from lower orbit."

The pink sphere on the display was growing. It was possible to imagine dark lines on its surface, scattered close to the equator. Drake waited. He knew the tendency of the human eye to play "connect the dots" and discern linear patterns where there were none. His thoughts spun away to the far-off past. Who was it, long before his own time, who had been fooled by that built-in physiological quirk of the human brain and had drawn maps of nonexistent Martian "canals"?

Except that this was no optical illusion. The linear features were real, growing in clarity every minute. As the ship drew closer to the planet, the display could no longer hold the full image of the world. The focus moved to a line, dark and straight, at center screen. It was bordered by colored rectangles and triangles. To Drake's eye and imagination the line was a road across a Kansas flatland. The broad fields were different shades of red, a child's quilt with bright patches that ranged from light pink to deepest crimson. The yellow brick road had turned dark brown, but it ran through farmlands of fairy-tale color.

The scale that accompanied the display gave the lie to the illusion. The "road" was a kilometer wide. The quilt was monstrous, each of its patches the size of a county of old Earth. Scattered darker dots within the patches were big enough to be towns.

The field of view zoomed in toward a narrower black thread at the center of the broad swath of road. Drake could see that the edges of the patchwork quilt were not regular. They were broken and random, the boundaries intruding on each other. The pink had spread in places onto the darker swath, like crabgrass invading an untended lawn.

The black thread must surely be water. Unlike on Mars, these canals were real. The line of banks ran ruler straight across the surface. Close to the water's edge, every few kilometers, a five-sided open tower of girders stretched toward the sky. The display closed in on one.

"This is too tall to be built on this planet with natural materials. Carbon composites are essential for its building and continued stability, which implies a reasonably advanced technology. Technology implies intelligence. But where is that intelligence?"