"Is it coming from the galaxy?" Drake had to send his own thought at maximum volume to penetrate the curtain of incoming noise.

A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-.

"I do not know." The ship's own signal was barely intelligible. "The source is so powerful. It comes from everywhere.

Wait." The ship de-tuned its receiver, and the volume of signal suddenly dropped to a tolerable level.

WARNING. YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. DO NOT PROCEED FARTHER.

WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. REPEAT, YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. HALT,.

AND DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. WORKING S-WAVE COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS ARE.

CONTAINED IN CARRIER WAVE. VISUAL AND REAL-TIME INTERACTION FOLLOWS.

"I'm sending our identification and reply." The ship was already transcribing protocols. "It is safe to do so. That signalcan't be coming from the galaxy ahead."

"How do you know?"

"Because there is no encryption. More than that, the signal is in standard form. It must be coming to us from our own form of mentality."

Drake did not need that last piece of information. The promised visual and real-time information flow was beginning, and pictures were already flowing in. The first frame was very familiar. It was Drake Merlin, staring at something right in front of him. A puzzled voice was saying, "Please transmit that identification sequence again. There appears to have been a transcription error. According to our records, you don't exist. You haven't existed for fifteen billion years."

Drake was not embodied, so he could not send an exultant real-time image of himself. The best that he could do was to provide his own stored and smiling icon, as it was preserved in the ship's memory.

"What you have received is not a transcription error. We exist, and you have the right ID sequence. We've been heading for home all this time. I'm sorry that it took so long." And then, the only thing that really mattered, the question: "Did you develop the technology needed to restore Ana? Is she there with you?"

While Drake waited for answers, he realized that everything else made sense. A rogue galaxy, devoid of life but sending out S-wave signals and filled with weapons of destruction, was a menace to every intelligence in the universe.

A region around that galaxy was needed as a quarantine zone. All the approach routes had to be monitored. Like a dangerous reef in a peaceful sea, the galaxy must be surrounded by warning bells and lightships. It was a beacon for the whole universe, the best possible place for lost travelers, like Drake and the ship, to arrive at.

And arrive they had. They were on the way home.

In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.

One of those things, now and again, was a little bit of luck.

Chapter 29.

Homecoming.

With Drake's return to human space, his problems seemed to be in the past.

The feeling of euphoria did not last. It ended when his question about Ana remained unanswered, and when the image of the other Drake Merlin vanished suddenly from the screen. It was replaced by the face of Tom Lambert. Tom's features, hair color, and expression varied wildly for a few seconds before they stabilized.

"Unfortunately, Ana has not been resurrected." Tom's mouth shrank to half its size, then enlarged again. Drake had seen the effect before. Some strong emotion, fear or joy or rage, was distorting the presentation. "The problem of resurrection will be worked on.

Will be worked on, after so many aeons? Drake wondered what they had been doing all this time. What could possibly be left to do?

But Tom Lambert was continuing. "I'm sorry." His face writhed with worry, then took on a lopsided smile. "We have not used this particular form of presentation for more than fifteen billion years. We never thought it would be necessary. A return such as yours was never anticipated, although we knew that the theory showed it to be formally possible. Now, of course, we understand exactly what happened. You and your ship remained in this universe, but you passed through a noncausal path in the caesura. Before you reemerged, you traveled seven billion light-years in space and eight billion years forward in time."

"And then I couldn't find you for umpteen billion more. But here I am. So what is there to be sorry about?""We are sorry that you encountered the warning concerning your approach to the Skrilant Galaxy."

"I assume that I needed it." Drake was not convinced by Tom Lambert's explanation. "I presume I would have been blown apart otherwise."

"That is most probable. But our warning included a representation of yourself."

"So I met myself. Big deal. I survived."

"But it was not yourself." Tom glanced sideways, away from Drake. "You, as you are now, did not encounter the full present form of Drake Merlin. I should add that I form a minor subset of that whole. Very soon you will meet."

"I think you'd better tell me what's going on. This isn't the sort of homecoming I was hoping for. What do you mean, I haven't met my present self?"

"Drake Merlin, in all the universe except on your ship, you are no longer a single entity. The mentality of Drake Merlin, except for you, is a composite."

"I don't believe it." Drake sensed coming disaster. "It's the one thing I knew I could never afford to do. If I merged to a composite with anyone else, I knew I might lose sight of my goal."

"But we did merge, in a different way. We regret that now. Sit quietly, Drake Merlin, for one moment more. We are opening an S-wave high-data-rate linkage with you- and your ship. Prepare for an update of many billions of years, since the time that you vanished from our horizon. Be prepared for strong coupling, then all your questions will be answered. The link is opening . . . now."

Drake submerged beneath a torrent of data, a million parallel sources streaming in. ...

The struggle with the Shiva was ending. He saw new composites, part human, part Shiva, controlling the interaction between the two forms of life. Humans and the giant sessile plants might never understand each other, but with the right intermediaries they could coexist.

With success came a new problem. Through the endless years of battle, Drake had remained aloof. He dared not allow himself to become part of any composite, organic or inorganic, within the interconnected webs of consciousness. Nor would he share his personal data banks with anyone or anything. His logic was simple and invincible: He alone was willing to make the awful decisions of death and destruction needed to defeat the Shiva.

He dared not risk any dilution of that will. But there was also the secret agenda: if he ceased to be a single individual, the drive to restore Ana might be lost.

For what seemed like forever, versions of his individual self had been downloaded and sent out on the warships, to meet their fiery or frigid end on planets at the edge of the Galaxy and beyond. With the Shiva ascendant that had been a oneway process. But in some of the spiral arms, humans at last began to hold their own. As they carried out their programs of counterattack and advance into the space between the galaxies, and then on through to other galaxies, human ships began to survive.

And now ...

He was coming back, Drake Merlin in his billions; each of him was different, each had his own unique experiences, each was undeniably Drake.

He had held himself apart from all others. But how could he remain aloof and refuse access to himself?

He could not. Drake formed a composite, an unusual one: Every component would be Drake Merlin.

At first it was total chaos. His element selves numbered beyond the billions; he had long ago lost count of the number of times he had been downloaded, and the total constantly increased. Parts of him were close by, parts were separated from the rest by millions of light-years; some had been partly destroyed in combat and, become maimed or incomplete versions of a whole Drake Merlin. All, without exception, were now different. Time and events produced changes in form, perspective, even in self-image. Drake struggled to understand, to assimilate, to integrate, and to maintain or create a single personality among that teeming horde of selves.

He was no longer essential to the struggle with the Shiva. A truce, incomprehensible to any entity but one of the human/ Shiva symbiote framers, was signed. The need for oversight by Drake slowly diminished. As the threat of the Shiva receded and the need for his continuous involvement decreased, the Drake composite became increasingly consumed by introspection and by his own process of reconstruction. He took no interest in external events unlessthey were relevant to a substantial fraction of his own components.

Those components were linked to other composites and to other data banks. They stretched out across the galactic clusters and the great rifts, on toward the edges of the accessible universe. Drake Merlin had become guardian and caretaker of the cosmos.

With the growth of his composite came something else: slowly and imperceptibly, his driving willpower weakened.

Old desires, needs that had propelled him forward from the farthest reaches of the past, dwindled and faded. Old longings no longer mattered. . . .

Until one day, unexpectedly, on the monitored boundary of the dead but malevolent Skrilant galaxy, a new but very old Drake Merlin appeared that formed no part of any other.

Within the vast extended composite of Drake Merlin, the news of the encounter stirred a curious uneasiness. The stranger was asking questions. The attempt to answer them called for the use of memories so far removed in time and space that they carried no physical impressions. The composite had to sift deep within its own data banks before it found answers.

The result was shocking. Drake Merlin had somehow, somewhere, lost the way. He had forgotten his own most solemn vows. Now he had to change-and wonder if there was time enough, before the end of the universe itself.

Drake emerged, to find Tom Lambert silently waiting. The data flood had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Drake realized something else. He was no longer on board his own ship, and he had become inexplicably different.

Tom Lambert nodded. "Your perception is correct. You were uploaded while the data transfer was proceeding, and superluminally transmitted here."

"And embodied?" Drake worried about the long-lost feeling of a tangible self.

"That is no longer necessary. In fact, if you are to understand what we are doing, many parallel inputs continue to be necessary. In such circumstances, material embodiment is no longer possible."

"Something has gone wrong, hasn't it?"

"It has. We became distracted. What we are doing to correct it-if we can-is this."

If the previous data flow had been a torrent, the new one was a tidal wave. It washed over Drake and carried him along without a choice.

First came a different sense of self. Drake Merlin had multiplied, a million, a billion, countless trillions of times. He was on every planet, in orbit around every star, present in every galaxy (even the lost Skrilant Galaxy Had its corps of Merlin mentalities). The distinction between organic and inorganic forms no longer meant anything. Changes from one to the other took place constantly. Drake felt his other self extending steadily across the whole universe. Even if he and the ship had done nothing but sit and wait after they passed through the caesura, eventually the extended composite would have discovered and recovered his lost individual self.

That individual self was in danger of drowning. He expressed his fear and heard the rest offering reassurance.

You can join us safely. You can never be lost. We are you.

"What are you doing?"

What we should have done long ago, and what we now must do. We are concerned not with individuals, but with universes. Remember this.

The trillions of voices became one: In a closed universe, a final point of collapse lies at the end of time. The eschaton, the Omega Point, the c-point-the space-time final boundary has been given a variety of names. Its main properties have long been defined. One of those properties is of paramount importance: close to the c-boundary, all information-everything that ever can be known-becomes accessible. Everything that ever can be known, and everything that has ever been known.

And the implications . . .

We went astray, but now our task is clear. We must survive. We must gather, absorb, and organize information as fastas possible. Near to the end, that accumulation will, we hope, become sufficient. Ana, our true Ana, will by our efforts be restored to us. Thanks to you, we have again become aware of what must be done. Will you become one with us and join our efforts ?

Drake knew that the goal was infinitely desirable. It was possible in principle. But was it possible in practice?

The mentality that Drake Merlin had become sprawled across the universe. It had near-infinite resources of data and processing. But it was far from omniscient. How much information was enough? Had the effort started too late?

Drake could not answer those questions. Perhaps there would never be enough information. However, he knew one thing: if the effort failed, it must not be because of the lack of even a single component or individual.

That made the decision easy. Decisions were always easy when you had no choice.

Drake sighed, and nodded. "Merge me in. Join me to all the rest of you. I'm ready to go to work."

Chapter 30.

Love and Eternity.

All the imagined analogies were wrong. When Drake agreed to merge with the universal Drake Merlin composite, he had seen himself as a tiny ant in a cosmic anthill, his every action subordinate to the common need.

It was not that way at all. He was the composite, the whole thing. And it was he. There was no sense of loss, but of enormous gain. He walked a carpet of tiny pink-petaled flowers on the surface of Eden, a garden world in a galaxy so far from Earth that it had never been named or even observed in Earth's lifetime. At the same time he maintained perpetual watch around the dead, deadly, and insane galaxies-Skrilant was not the only one. Sometimes he saw life there, indomitable as ever even in an aging universe, creeping back to blistered dead hills or ravaged ocean beds.

That was rewarding. Some things were not. Some things were close to intolerable. On a world of a remote globular cluster, he saw a species far more intelligent than humans rise to artistic triumph and technological power in just two centuries. He was present when the Lakons announced that rather than joining the combined human mentality, which had been offered to them, they would for reasons beyond human understanding choose self-immolation. He looked on helplessly as Lakon adults and children walked into the sacrificial flames. The babies, left behind, died of starvation.

He could have interfered-and done what? A being can more easily be killed than made to live. But he knew he would carry the memory with him to the end of time.

The universe did not care. That was the important point. Humans cared, but the universe was indifferent. He was present, ten billion light-years away from the Lakons, when two galaxies collided and hard radiation wiped out a thousand potential intelligences. He watched a black hole, invisibly small to human eyes but massing as much as one of Earth's great mountains, run through its last second of evaporation. An observing party, too curious and too close, died with it. After the final burst of elementary particles and hard X rays, nothing remained. That seemed symbolic. It suggested to Drake the nihilistic end of the cosmos itself.

Present conditions offered few clues as to that violent end. The universe seemed peaceful, moving toward a quietus that, if it came at all, suggested not a bang but a whimper. The blue shift was more pronounced, but still it seemed innocuous. Not observation but physics and abstract mathematics promised the final fiery doom, certain and implacable and unavoidable.

Drake forced himself away from introspection. There was a job to be done. He must collect, store, and organize information. He must remain intact and integrated and keep in touch with all of his myriad components. Computation power grew linearly with the number of units; coordination problems grew exponentially.

As time went on communication itself became easier. He soon realized why: The universe was shrinking. Contact between far-separated elements was easier. Increased problems of coordination more than cancelled that gain. He found himself scrambling, working nonstop and harder than ever to hold a single focus and a single goal.Collect, collate, compare. He slaved on, sometimes wondering if there would ever be a recognizable end point to his labors. Would he still be serving as data clerk to the universe, when everything melted and fused into the infernal fireball?

The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.

Collect, collate, compare. Drake worked on. The sky became brighter. The more distant galaxies glowed bluer.

Constantly, he was forced to create more copies of himself to deal with the increased volumes of data. The number of his components grew, and grew again: trillions, quadrillions, quintillions. How many? He no longer attempted to track the total. Contact with some elements of himself, riding in as S-waves from far across the sweep of galaxies, were pure conundrums. They were indisputably Drake. Yet these components of his own self felt more alien than any strangeness of the Shiva or the Snarks. The effort of assimilating all his divergent personalities became ever greater.

As the universe comes close to its ultimate convergence, the density of mass-energy will increase and so will the temperature. At the end comes a singularity of infinite heat and pressure.

Words, theories, that was all they were. They had no basis in reality. This was reality, the toil of information collection without an end.

Except that finally, after a span so great that it was easy to believe that it could never happen, an end seemed in sight.

The long downward curve steepened. The cosmos was shrinking faster-noticeably faster. Work for Drake became a frenzy, a blur of action. Energy densities were running higher. Information transfer was faster, over diminishing distances. Processes could proceed more rapidly.

And then more rapidly yet.

The microwave radiation was microwave frequencies no longer. It had shortened to visible wavelengths. The space between the stars crackled with energy.

Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease and midnight never come.

But midnight was approaching. Time moved on. The sky was falling, imploding toward its final singularity, and the firmament had become a continuous actinic glare when Drake became aware of a new presence, a different voice speaking from among his endless sea of selves.

It emerged from the white noise that formed the edge of Drake's consciousness and steadily approached his central coordinating nexus. He did not know where it had come from, but as it neared it seemed to touch and merge with every one of his components. It interrupted the rhythm of his frantic work, and as such it was dangerous. Somehow he must stop its action.