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The station robot guided her to contact with the Oracle, which was a creation of the Others but no automaton.

Quasi-solid, subject to shuddering, splitting quakes, the surface of the neutron star lay beneath an atmosphere six millimeters deep. There, under a weight in the trillions of Earth gravities, at densities which were still higher multiples of Earth’s, raw nuclei interacted in ways unthinkable elsewhere. Protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos, their antiparticles—fugitive higher elements—mesons of every kind—baryons, leptons, bosons, fermions—charm, spin, color, strangeness—fusing, sundering, turning into each other and back again, briefly orbiting, forming assemblages which might endure for whole microseconds—the matter of the star was as manifold, as changeable as the gas and water and dust that begot us.

Life is not a thing, it is a way. It is a series of happenings, it is the evolution of patterns which carry information, it is growth and decay and regrowth. Wherever the possibility of this exists, life will be.

When Caitlín heard, she said, “That’s not chemistry. It’s alchemy.” Indeed, self-replicating structures on a subatomic rather than molecular level went beyond the physics known to
human or Betan. Once she had encountered the Oracle, though, Joelle moved rather quickly toward understanding. In the mystical ecstasy of this deeper entrance into the Ultimate, she lost sorrow as she lost self.

She could have no discourse directly with the inhabitants of the pulsar. They were too short-lived. A few seconds, a few turnings of heaven, and such a less-than-microscopic being had finished its span. But so swift, so furiously energetic were the processes within it that those seconds encompassed more perception and experience, more living, than a human century. To it, she was as inert as a stone was to her.

The Oracle gave her a slowed-down playback from certain lives. She could follow mere snatches, random fragments, of the stories. The heroes were too alien to her. She did come to see that they had been heroes.

Exploring through a billion generations, they discovered the Fire Fountains, which raged in magnificence upward and upward beyond sounding. In the haze of radiation that filled the world they knew, they had had no idea of a sky. Now
—

There were mountains, many of which endured for whole years by Earth reckoning, the tallest of which reared twelve and thirteen millimeters high. Seekers of knowledge set themselves to follow the course of the Fire Fountains by climbing
.

Dynasties of the bold came to be, parent, child, grandchild, great-grandchild, who toiled, suffered, risked, and at last died in the great venture. Civilizations rose, flourished, and fell while the climbers fought their way on, a generation bequeathing to the next a base that was farther aloft. Many among them perished and more despaired when they reached the limits of the air. But a council of the undaunted prevailed, and work began on a tunnel up through a chosen mountain
.

A million lifetimes later, through a transparent dome, a colony at the peak beheld whither the Fire Fountains went
—
beheld the stars
.

Was that sheer indomitability?
Joelle wondered.
Or did the Oracle give them
…
heart …to continue striving through the human equivalent of a geological era?

She lacked language to ask that question, and doubted in any case that the Oracle would make such a claim. It was beyond pride.

It had been fashioned by the Others to dwell on the pulsar. Gigantic beside the natives, virtually immortal, it kept its place, which became a shrine unto them. Self-aware, of an intelligence
to match hers when she was in holothesis, it still felt no loneliness, no dullness, ever: for it shared in the doings, the thoughts, the very souls of yonder entities. (She speculated about quasi-telepathy via modulation of the strong nuclear forces, but the vocabulary she had in common with it was too primitive—a kind of sign language—for her to inquire.) It would counsel them when they wished, though she got an impression its pronouncements were deliberately as ambiguous as those spoken at Delphi, lest it cause in them a pseudomorphosis that would stunt the maturing of their innate powers. It had recorded and gave back to them, when they desired, entire histories of theirs, vanished nations, forgotten achievements.

Mainly, it mediated between them and outsiders. Messages passed from it to the station and back over a medium which could carry them. (Quark beams?) The station relayed by various means, including radio. The Oracle slowed down or speeded up transmissions according to who was receiving.

Thus, through it, the inhabitants of the star and the visitors who fared hither to learn about the star were enabled to know something of each other. That might be the closest these people could come to sharing in the brotherhood which the Others fostered. Or it might not.

Brodersen secured himself by a handgrip on a table and confronted his folk in the common room. At his back, a viewscreen showed the revolving rays—sword blades, clock hands—nearer, brighter. Soon the shield must ward off that wrath.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” he told them. “You know that. Even before free fall causes irreversible changes in us, we’ll have exceeded a safe radiation dosage. The background count is just too God damn high, and our protections are inadequate.

“We can retreat to a safe distance and wait, in hopes of somebody who can help us arriving before we starve. Of course, that means converting the ship to spin mode; she’d never boost again. However, it might pay off. We might get a free ride home.

“Joelle, you’ve said bloody little to anybody, these past weeks. We’ve borne with you, knowing how tough your job must be. Learning a Betan lingo from scratch was a picnic by comparison, I’m sure. But today we’ve got to have a report from you. I’ve asked you to give it to us all, because it concerns us all.

“Okay, if you please, proceed.”

Floating beside him, before the rest of them, she thought wearily that she saw shock lingering on faces. I
do look awful
. The mirror had shown hair become a matted gray mane, eyes sunken and dark-rimmed and bloodshot in a visage that was hardly more than skin stretched across a skull, body turned lank and yellowish, hands which sprouted untrimmed fingernails and continually trembled.
Oh, curse this abominable flesh, that will not let me stay in communion with the Oracle!

She mustered dryness: “I should emphasize that my exchanges have been rudimentary. In spite of computer enhancement, in spite of unstinted cooperation from my opposite number, I don’t have enough years left in me to figure out the complete language. A transmission lag of minutes doesn’t help, either. I may well be totally misinterpreting various things, including what’s crucial to us.”

“We would be nowhere without you,” Susanne Granville said, arm in arm with Carlos Rueda.

Joelle drew breath. “Well, then, if you’ll bear those reservations in mind—The Others built the station because they knew that spacefaring species would want to study a world so unique.” I
merely guess that they trust that through this study, both the star dwellers and the outsiders will grow a little, will come a little closer to being what they are
. “I haven’t been able to find out whether they manifest themselves directly to any of the races concerned, but my impression is they don’t. Probably they come on their own to hear out the data, the biographies, the Oracle has been preparing for them—”

“They share, then,” Caitlín breathed. “Their wish is to know the lives that are on every world. The better to love?”

“They certainly knew us well before they programmed that robot at the Solar System T machine,” Frieda said. “What Oracle did they plant on Earth?”

“Nothing like this’n, obviously,” Brodersen said. “Go on, Joelle.”

“A number of advanced societies have found their way here, presumably by trial and error,” the holothete proceeded. “They send scientific expeditions from time to time. There’s no set schedule, and nobody comes frequently. Remember how much else a race will have to engage its attention and effort, once it’s learned the routes through several gates. Quite possibly, one or two may visit inside the next decade. But they don’t know how to reach Sol or Phoebus or Centrum. How could they? The Oracle itself doesn’t know—”

Into a shaken hush, she said hastily: “I have made progress. If we could stay where we are, in communication range, I’d make more. The Oracle seems willing to tell me anything. But we can’t. So I’ve concentrated on asking it about the star gates themselves. And I’ve gotten an inkling.

“I can’t calculate where and when a particular path will fetch us out. However, given what I’ve learned here, I can make a probabilistic computation of the magnitude and direction of that transit. What’s more important, I can make a pretty good estimate of how likely it is that another T machine will be at the end of a gate.

“The Others continue building them, you see.” Laughter rattled around her larynx. “That word ‘continue’ is a classic example of a meaningless noise, isn’t it? Excuse me. I’ve gotten out of the habit of being limited to my natural brain.

“The point is, the Others don’t work at random. They know the plenum better than that. They’re always expanding their frontiers—for knowledge only, I’m sure, not conquest—”
(For love,
Caitlín whispered; Joelle saw) “and they go to places where they’re likeliest to find something besides vacuum. Remember, they have to send the materials through, maybe also the tools, for constructing a new T machine before an expedition can return. No small job, even for them.

“I think if we relay ourselves from machine to machine according to a scheme I can work out as we travel and gather more data… if we always try to jump as far as possible, in a plausible direction… I think eventually this will lead us to whatever frontier they are on. They themselves.”

Joelle felt faint. Her head felt full of sand. Every cell of her seemed to ache. She free-fall slumped and longed for sleep.

Dimly she heard Brodersen: “Does everybody understand we’d be gambling? The lady does not guarantee we’ll find transportation onward at any given hop. The odds may favor us; but every time we repeat, those odds go down.”

“We could stay here, in spin mode and a wide orbit,” Weisenberg suggested. “Apparently we’ve a reasonable chance that a ship will come in before we starve. I daresay her civilization can synthesize food for us and won’t mind doing that. Her crew won’t be able to guide us home, but doubtless we could live out quite interesting lives on her planet of origin.”

“Are you serious, Phil?” Caitlín asked.

“No. I have a family. I did think one of us ought to state the case for remaining.”

“And leaving humankind to the likes of Ira Quick?” Dozsa snarled.

“Whoa, there,” Brodersen said “We’ve time to think this over. Meanwhile—Joelle, let’s get you under treatment, starting with about twenty-four hours of sleep.”

She hardly noticed his embrace while he took her down the corridor to her cabin, nor did she much heed how Caitlín sponged the dried sweat from her, nor how they together harnessed her in bed and waited till she slept. As she skidded into darkness, her thoughts were entirely of the Oracle and of those who had shaped it.

J
UMP.

Visible stars were lessened in number, as on a hazy night of Earth. The brightest were mostly red, which suggested they were near; a few giants glared steely blue.

A sun hung large among them. Its dull blood-orange hue required no dimming by optics. The zodiacal lens was immense, though wanly lit, but the disc was featureless—no spots, flares, prominences, corona—and had no sharp photospheric edge, fading instead blurrily away into space.

Closer, broader still to the eye, was a planet which the T machine evidently orbited, in a Trojan position with respect to a big moon. Both those bodies glowed too, ember. Magnifying, Brodersen saw the primary globe molten beneath a thick, sooty-clouded atmosphere. As he stared, an asteroid drifted across the field of view, dark, pitted, tumbling end over end.

Joelle spoke: “This is a new system coalescing. The sun’s energy is from contraction; it isn’t yet compressed enough at the core to start thermonuclear reactions. Space remains dusty, rocks of every size plentiful. Falling in on nascent planets, they heat these to incandescence while adding to their mass. I think this one before us will come to resemble Earth rather closely.”

Or could it be Earth?
shivered through Brodersen.
No, that’s too unlikely. Makes no practical difference anyway. I don’t want to believe it. I won’t
. “How long’ll that take?” he asked aloud, pointlessly aside from a stunned curiosity.

“Perhaps five million years until the sun is settled into the main sequence. On the planet, formation of a solid crust may be slower. I’d need more data to give you a proper estimate.”

“Sorry. We won’t linger. Nothing for us here.”

Except, my God, getting a fresh glimpse of the range the
Others move in, live in. To watch a system of worlds get born
—
surely then to watch them evolve and flourish and finally die—for that, they opened this gateway
.

J
UMP.

“O-o-oh!” Caitlín’s voice rang over the intercom. “Oh, glory, glory!” It broke in a sob.

Space blazed, stars and stars crowded together until there was hardly a glimpse of the Milky Way and hardly seemed to be any blackness left between them. The brilliance of many was like that of Venus or Jupiter seen at their brightest, ashine upon Earth. Most were of ruby color, but some ranged through rich orange to deep golden.

White-aureate was the sun to which
Chinook
had come, half a degree of arc wide, heartbreakingly like Phoebus.

“Where are we, Joelle?” Brodersen called rough-toned.

Her answer held an unevenness, a tinge of delight and… humility?… which had long been lacking in it. “How beautiful—We must be in a globular cluster, Dan. Old; hardly any dust or gas left free; the biggest, shortest-lived members long since burnt out, leaving mainly dwarfs, though the G types, akin to Sol, also survive—Let’s stay a while, no matter what.”