THE MISSION TEAM hadn’t told Julie what to expect, and she certainly had not expected this gale rushing around her ears. Or the cascading circles of light that came from all directions and spun past like leaves on the wind. Where was Ik? For a moment she thought she heard him talking, perhaps to her. But then she didn’t. Had she imagined it? What was happening to them? Were they moving forward through space? Backward through time? Was the universe unspooling backward, undoing itself? She had no real sense of physical movement. She felt at once frozen and unfrozen, a quantum particle caught in some weird change of state.
She struggled to focus. All of time and space seemed to envelop her. Galaxies and star-clouds and dark-matter halos revolved around and through each other in a spiral dance, almost like the iridescent balls of the translator. And not just the cosmos: she felt memories slow-cascading around her, memories of her life on Earth and on Triton, of John, of her journey with the translator. It was astounding, exhilarating, bewildering. Are we really moving? What’s happening? Where am I? Uncertainty threatened to crush her.
The stones stirred, revealing to her a flickering, fantastic web of fiery lines. What did that represent? And then she knew: it was all the ghostly connections that bound her to her own time, but also to a billion points in deep time and thousands of light-years away. They did not link all at once, but crinkled their way down into the past, linking, linking, linking in a kind of cinematic progression. The quantum entanglement would project them billions of years into the past, but it would take a little while to get there.
She was grateful that whatever was happening did not seem to depend upon her understanding it.
***
Waking and dreaming blurred. She envisioned the enemies they were seeking: hordes of rabid bats, berserker robots, shadows that fled from light only to come back, always back . . .
She tried to shake herself awake. Bad enough to face enemies in the unknown, without giving her imagination free rein. But it was hard to tell if she’d succeeded. She began to have the sensation of slipping downward through geologic strata. That part felt real to her. The feeling of passage deep into time worked its way under her skin, and trickled down her back like cold seawater. The “present” had receded out of sight, overhead, with the future.
Half a billion years and falling . . .
***
A moment came when she glimpsed something moving, something other than distant star clouds and galactic arms, something darker and more solid than the snow flurries that gusted and swirled. It seemed to drift toward them, and then whip past when it got close.
/Ik, did you see that?/
The Hraachee’an stirred. /See, hrrm, what?/
/Something flying by. More than one thing, maybe. Stones, did you see it?/ Or am I losing my mind?
*Something passed, yes,* the stones whispered, as if they were straining against some force that didn’t want them to speak. *Something went by, but what, we cannot say.*
Julie shivered. She’d been hoping for reassurance. /It seemed to be going the other way. Forward in time. Did it seem that way to you?/
*It did, yes. We know you are wondering, was it Mindaru? But we did not see it clearly.*
/I think it might have been./ But maybe it was just a shadow. We could be jumping at shadows. Then she had a thought. /Could it have been a ship? Moving in that other thing—the starstream? Are we in the starstream?/
The stones seemed to hedge their answer. *We did pass through it. But we are far back in time now, long before the starstream was built. Still, with the time-tide distortion, who knows?*
***
There was no immediate fallout from the sighting. But they passed through another period of blowing snow, with billowing snowflakes glowing like stars. Perhaps they were stars. Was this just a way of seeing their movement through space, as well as through time? She found it impossible to distinguish the two.
The sensation of dreaming returned. Were those planets coming into focus and vanishing again in the snow? She thought she saw them; and then she could not recall any details. She heard Ik’s voice grumbling nearby. But she couldn’t reach him. When he spoke, he was hard to understand. She felt isolated, lonely. Had he just said something about a planet?
She saw no planet.
Or did she? Had she been asleep?
Her senses ballooned out of her body, and everything came into focus. Yes, there was a planet floating in front of them. How far into the galaxy had they come? How far back in time? Forty thousand light-years, and nearly a billion years in time, so far.
At first this planet reminded her of Neptune, floating graceful and ethereal in space. But as she looked more closely, she realized it was quite different: this world had more contrast in its atmosphere, and a solid surface shone through here and there. Were there oceans feeding those clouds? Land masses? Yes, both. The chemistry of the atmosphere suggested primitive life, at least. No signs of more developed life, though. She felt her knowledge of the planet filling in like a bottle with water. How did she know these things?
She tried to focus through the clouds. /Is this the world we’re looking for?/
*We are here to determine that.*
/How, rrrm, will we do that?/ Ik asked. He seemed to be floating, weightless, his long-fingered hands stretched out toward the planet.
The stones did not answer immediately. But an image welled up in Julie’s mind, a schematic of the observations that the sensor arrays were making—and the control and data pathways. /We’re part of the array,/ she said, startled. /The control and sensor systems operate directly through us?/
*Of course. Your thoughts, your minds, are woven into the fabric of the ghoststream. Yours and Ik’s.*
/And yours?/
*And ours.*
So they were not just riding in this ghostly probe; they were the probe. But the stones were processing all that information at a speed neither she nor Ik could keep up with: EM spectrum, particle flux, gravity waves, magnetic fields. What among all that data would indicate the presence of Mindaru or their ilk? What were they looking for?
/Ik? You’ve seen them. What do they look like? Would we recognize them if we saw them?/
It seemed to her that Ik shivered a little. /Hrah, I have never seen them, only felt them./
/But you fought them, didn’t you?/
/On the inside, yes./ Ik pressed his hands to his bony temples, over his glimmering stones. /In my head, and my voice-stones. The only time I saw a Mindaru vessel, it was terrifying—it seized our ship like a giant claw. But the things that almost got me were invisible./
Like the specks that had attacked her own ship? she thought. How could they screen the planet for that?
*Our scan of the visible region is seventy percent complete,* the stones reported calmly, as though unaware of their conversation. *No indication of Mindaru activity.*
/How can you know that, if they’re invisible?/
*We are looking for signatures of their defensive fields. Or indications of cybernetic activity on the planet.*
How was that possible? Should she be surprised at what the daughters of the translator could do—daughters of a machine that had caught a malicious entity somewhere around the orbit of Saturn and hurled it into the Sun? What about this planet said ‘Mindaru’ or ‘no-Mindaru’? The world of the Survivors, the Mindaru progenitors, had been decimated by merciless thermonuclear bombardment, but still they had come back. What kind of world would the Survivors or their Mindaru servants live on? A life-bearing world—or a sun-seared rock?
*Not known. We can only search for signs we think we would see.*
/I feel data washing through me,/ Ik murmured. /I understand bits of it. But the big picture . . . no . . . /
Soon the stones said, *We do not find the electro-quantum activity we seek. We judge this planet an unlikely target. We must move on.*
Ik sounded startled. /That is awfully sudden. Should we not look more thoroughly?/
*Perhaps, but understand: a thorough search would take orders of magnitude longer. There are more than ten thousand possible worlds in this region of the galactic core. To perform a thorough search on each could take longer than your life expectancy. Our best hope is to cover more territory. Look quickly and move on.*
Julie opened her mouth, then closed it. /Okay,/ she said finally.
***
Another cleared, and Julie gazed at a different planet. /That was fast. I’m glad you’re driving,/ she murmured to the stones.
This planet was darker, with no bodies of water, no clouds. The scan took little time, and soon the stones warned them of another jump.
/How do you do that?/ she whispered as yet another snowstorm cleared, revealing a beautiful gas giant planet.
/Hrah, you think the Mindaru might be on a gas giant?/ Ik asked.
*Difficult to say. But the planet also has moons, and they might host our quarry, as well,* the stones said, answering the last question first. *As for how, we move from world to world by shifting the parameters of the entanglement.*
/Just like that?/ Julie asked. /You make it sound easy./
*It is difficult and finicky. The expenditure of energy in the ghoststream is considerable, and the method for finding the next candidate world is too complex to describe without—*
/Never mind,/ she said. /It’s just that I feel as if we’re riding the end of a big flashlight beam, and someone at the other end is waving us around—/
*A fair analogy.*
/—except that we’ve gone a billion years into the past, and we’re traveling a lot faster than light-speed./
*Instantaneously, as far as the entanglement is concerned. Hardly at all, by other measurements.*
/But—/ she said, and then stopped. She closed her eyes for a moment to focus on the datastream, and discovered that they were scanning not just the gas giant, but three moons that were currently on its near side.
/Anything here?/ she asked, and then realized she didn’t have to ask; she could just filter the information out of the stream. /Wait—are there signs on that third moon—?/
*Possible residual traces. Worth a closer look.*
/A landing?/
*In a manner of speaking,* said the stones. *First, the broad scan.* Long pause. Then: *Broad scan complete.*
/Now?/
*Now.*
The snowstorm blur swept in and was gone. They were now gazing down over the rocky plain of one of the larger moons. Before she could wonder what next, the view jacked inward with stomach-wrenching speed. Now they were hovering just above the ground, close enough to inspect the ghostly shapes of the boulders scattered over the plain. Nothing moved, except for a faint whisper of wind, a tiny stirring of dust particles.
/Doesn’t look alive to me,/ she murmured, while reminding herself that apparently lifeless worlds could harbor surprises. She suddenly remembered where they had first found the translator, beneath the ice of Triton.
*This place was alive, eons ago,* said the stones, after a prolonged pause. *There may yet be microbial life.*
/Can we test for that?/
*Not our mission. We search for traces—active, dormant, or dead—of electromechanical or electroquantum activity, organized at a level of complexity indicative of past or present cybernetic activity.*
/And—?/
Another long pause. Then: *It is difficult to be certain. Do you see those faint line traces—the crosshatching, perhaps, of places where energy flow once occurred, deep down in the rock?*
She sampled the data, and then she saw it, a ghostly residue in the deep structure of the rock.
*We would like to test another location.*
/Okay./
As Ik concurred, the air around them shivered, and they were peering over a system of carved rivulets, the deepest ones glinting silver. Water? Molten metal? Circuit boards? She couldn’t tell by looking, but the sensor array told her: water ice.
Here the stones found a slightly stronger trace, enough to be identified temporally: At this time, the trace was tens of millions of years old. *Once part of a network, perhaps, now defunct.*
/What do we do about it?/
*No current presence detected. We will note the location and move on.*
Move on. Like a ghost over the landscape.
The snow came.
***
The snow cleared over a sulfurous, scalding planet not very different from Venus—except that it, too, had a moon. They found no trace. They moved on.
The snow cleared over three more gas giants and their satellites, each circling a star of different size and color. One of the three had traces, a little stronger than their first find. Perhaps more recent.
The mission paused while they slept, fitfully, in their cocoon of the ghoststream. The mission planners had not planned adequately for the need for sleep. When Julie woke, she felt more tired than she had before she’d slept. A stimulating nutrient liquid came to her lips through a tube, and she forced herself back to semi-alertness. Ik was coming around from his meditation. /Another day, another dollar,/ Julie murmured, and in reply she heard only raspy breathing. By the time Ik was fully back, they were hovering over an ice field on a small, terrestrial-seeming planet.
The stones already had their scan results. *They were here in the last half-million years. This is a fresh trail.*
/Fresh trail?/
*By following a trail of increasingly strong traces, from one system to the next, we hope to home in on the planet of origin.*
Julie shivered. /Carry on./
***
Thirty-seven snowstorms later they found a world of oceans, clouds, snow, and photosynthetic plant life. Sensors detected a fine network of electroquantum pathways in the rocky substratum, which reverberated ever so faintly, as though they might have been used within the last thousand years. Could they be identified as Mindaru, and not some other ancient computer network? Not unambiguously. *But it is consistent with our target,* said the stones.
/Suppose it was the Mindaru,/ Ik said. /What then?/
Julie shivered at the thought of meeting live Mindaru. /Aren’t we trying to find out if they’re here now?/
*If they were here a thousand years ago, and have since retreated, perhaps we can follow the trail of their retreat. Or, go back an additional thousand years.*
/Uh, hrrm,/ said Ik. /Suppose they haven’t actually retreated, but are keeping out of sight while certain observers from another time take stock of the situation. Maybe they saw us coming, and hid./
*That is unlikely, unless they deliberately altered the pathways in the substrate to mimic faint residual traces. Also, if our time-travel models are correct, they should not be able to detect our presence at all.*
/Those models . . . we are testing them now, yes?/ said Ik.
*Yes,* the stones conceded. *It is an important question.*
In hopes of testing the question, they stayed a little longer here, searching for animal life or anything else that might respond to their presence—if their presence was detectable. But they found no macroscopic life on which to test.
They moved on.
***
As they searched the worlds within a two-hundred light-year radius—that being the region about which they could range with only slight tweaks of the ghoststream—they found a steady progression of stronger traces as they moved toward the galactic core. Macro-life remained elusive, though on one large moon they found ruins of a civilization of builders, an electrifying discovery. They also found strong hints of a one-time Mindaru presence. Had they been here long enough to destroy whatever civilization had managed to take root even in the face of pounding radiation from the galactic core?
Leaving that place, Julie felt frightened, depressed, and disoriented. It was the first concrete hint she had seen of the destructiveness of the Mindaru here, in this time and place. She felt extremely mortal.
/Where shall we look next?/ Ik asked. They had reached the inner edge of a well-defined star cloud. They had not completely searched the cloud—that would take forever—but another band of stars and glowing nebulae beckoned from across a gap of darkness and dust.
*Inward,* murmured the translator-stones. *Farther inward is where we must go.*
/Across the gap?/
*Across the gap. Toward the center of the galaxy. Always toward the center. And farther back in time.*