Beyond the outer reaches of the Five Worlds, beyond their outermost world, in a region of darkness but not emptiness known as the Kuiper Belt, Kay Free met with her two companions once more.
Again, Mel Sent was last to arrive, with blusterings and lack of apology.
"So much to do—always so much to do! There was Mother to attend to briefly, and then once again . . ."
She went on, but there was an undercurrent of melancholy to her complaints that Kay Free both understood and mourned.
"I was here when requested—as always," Pel Front snapped.
Mel Sent began to defend herself, making Pel Front even more waspish.
Kay Free said nothing, though normally she would referee and find contentment in the act. But her mind was on other things.
"You've both attended to your other duties?" she asked when finally the sparring between Mel Sent and Pei Front ended on its own.
"Yes," Pei Front said shortly.
"Mother was not happy--but, yes, of course."
"None of us is happy," Kay Free said.
"True," Mel Sent said, and even Pei Front did not disagree.
"Then we are agreed that the calling was not a false one," Kay Free said.
"Agreed." Mel Sent sighed.
Pei Front nodded.
"Very well," Kay Free said, with a sense of finality.
There were no creatures here, no life-forms to inhabit. Kay Free herself was but a whisper of pale light, a shimmer on the border of the visible and infrared spectrum. Seen by an optical telescope, she would be all but invisible, a scatter of particles excited by the faintest of solar winds. With the aid of an instrument studying the infrared band, she would appear more substantial; in a radio telescope, she would give evidence as a blot Of the faintest noise.
For some reason, perhaps sadness, Kay Free wished that she was embedded in a life-form at the moment. She sensed the same in the others. In her mind's eye, she still saw the bloated, blackened dead thing she had shared in the water; and now she knew the source of her despondency.
"I wish this were not so," Mel Sent said; and if she had been in a life-form capable of tears, she would show tears at this moment.
"Wishing will not make it go away," Pei Front said, his peevishness muted.
"There is work to do," Kay Free said, seeking to break the spell.
The others acceded; and work was done.
Kay Free thought of farming. Or, specifically, of harvest.
She had studied farming once, early in her days here, had studied it with the fascination she held for all life. On the third planet, where she had begun her study, she had first been drawn to the regularity of it: rows of planted things, cultivated with almost worshipful diligence, because, to these creatures on the third planet, this cultivation meant life itself. For a brief time she had studied the hunt—but had quickly lost interest, because hunting was only the extension of the end of all life: death. Death did not interest her, except as a process; it was the struggle of life to stay alive that she found fascinating, and elegant. Noble was a word she had favored.
Pei Front had argued, and persuasively, that the growing of crops was only another form of hunting: that one form of life, vegetation, was raised with care not out of love but only to sustain another form of life. "It's the same as the raising of livestock," he had said, "only vegetables don't moo."
His reasoning had been persuasive, and yet it had not won Kay Free over; to her, vegetables, though life, were not in any way sentient. They were more a hybrid of life and nonlife; even a cow could think, on its own terms (she had once inhabited a cow, just to test this theory), but a vegetable was nothing more than response to stimuli.
But this was all play: what really interested her was the excitement that the end product of farming engendered in the farmers themselves. The harvest was, on the third planet at that time, an actually mystical experience something that would later be called religious. There were festivals to the natural world, to water and earth, blessings for rain and temperance of climate, worship of the star that gave the farmers, and their crops, warmth and needed sustenance.
"Hogwash," Pel Front had said—pointing to these same primitive farmers beating in the skulls of rival tribesmen when in the least threatened, when Kay Free had tried to argue their nobility. "They just do what they do to stay on their mudball as long as possible, before turning back to dust."
But Kay Free had kept her thoughts and had a!-ways taken a kind of schoolmarmish pride in the witnessing of any harvest, be it a row of fat kale in Mesopotamia or the first hydroponic tomatoes, tiny and pallid, on Mars.
And here, now, was a different kind of harvest.
While performing her task, something unknown to her dropped over her like a shroud. In all of the millennia of her existence, she had only felt doubt once or twice. Always, it had dissipated almost before it was sensed.
This time, it rose into her thoughts and stayed. Instantly the calling came to her.
It came to the others, also. A light-year to her left, Pel Front stopped his task; and a hundred light-years beyond him, Mel Sent did the same. Without living bodies to inhabit, they became merely particles frozen in space. It was more a silence through their being than an outer silence here, where there was no sound.
As always, everything was lifted away from Kay Free: All thought and awareness were gone; she was freed of everything save being itself.
Without thinking or speaking, she said, "Yes, my Life."
Blissful nothingness filled her, drowned her doubts, washed her clean.
"Yes, my Life," she repeated.
As instantly as it had come, the moment of calling went away.
Kay Free sensed in her companions, also, a removal of doubt and a cleansing.
No longer did she wish for a living thing to inhabit, in order to produce tears. There was still a sadness but with it now, making it whole, was understanding.
In a little while they were finished.
In the gathering place, they pushed their chosen fragments off into the appropriate orbit.
Kay Free once again thought of harvest; the chunks of ice, planetary detritus, had been selected with care from the farm that the Kuiper Belt was; they had been pulled out of their rows, ripe and fat, and now they would perform their appointed task.
One after another, the fragments, some as large as ten kilometers, were flung in a precise arc, dropped out of their farm and downward. Soon the warmth of the star would warm them, and they would grow tails. Some of the ice and gases on their surfaces would melt away behind them, making them beautiful for a while to behold.
They would become comets.
And, when they reached their destination, something else.