Gunai seethed with sorrow and rage as she helped to prepare Kula’s corpse for its final journey.
Kula had always delighted in her body, its warm and golden glow, the way it flowed into a thousand useful and expressive shapes. She had explored the universe with its senses and reached out with its fields. Now it was nothing but a senseless lump of flesh and brain and polymer, a cold mockery of what she had been. Kula the person was gone. Taken by a wolf.
The torn and ravaged corpse floated between Gunai and Old John, barely visible in the dim starlight. The other members of the tribe were gathered in a sphere around them, their glowing forms held in angular shapes of grief as Old John spoke the words of Kula’s eulogy.
More than Kula’s life had been lost in the attack. Kula had carried a child, conceived at their recent meeting with the tribe of Yeoshi. Gone now, along with whatever fraction of the father’s memories it had carried. Even Kula’s intuition, one of the best in the tribe, was gone. A compound tragedy.
“We mourn and remember Kula,” Old John concluded. “For as long as we remember her, in a very real way she still lives.”
“We mourn and remember Kula,” they all said, and paused for silent reflection.
Unwillingly, Gunai’s mind returned to the moment when Kula’s screams had been their first notice. She blamed herself. Kula should not have strayed so far from the tribe, she knew; Enaji and Huss should have kept a better lookout; Yaeri should have called a warning. But Gunai, as tribe leader, was ultimately responsible. She should have recognized the danger, should have prevented it somehow. That knowledge pained her, burned from the inside like the hunger that chewed at her belly.
Old John caught Gunai’s attention. His form did not show emotion like a normal person’s; it was fixed in an archaic five-lobed shape. But through long acquaintance Gunai had learned to read his attitudes and intentions. Without a word, Gunai and Old John grasped Kula’s body with their fields and accelerated it toward the nearest star.
The cold and lifeless thing quickly faded from view—just another bit of dark matter in a cooling universe. The tribe stared after it long after it had vanished, then gathered together in a group embrace of sorrow and reassurance. They held each other for a long time, but eventually, one by one, they drifted away to forage for food. Not even grief was stronger than hunger.
Gunai made sure all four lookouts were at their stations before she allowed herself to begin foraging.
After a time she found a small patch of zeren. She spread across it, taking a little solace from its sparkling sweetness. “Zero-point energy” was what Old John called it, but to Gunai and the rest of her tribe it was zeren, delicious and rare. Gunai recalled a time when zeren was something you could almost ignore—a constant crackling thrum beneath the surface of perception—but now there were just a few thin patches here and there. These days the tribe subsisted mostly on a thin diet of starlight, and even that was growing cold. Soon they would be forced to move on again. Yeoshi had told her the foraging was better in the direction of the galactic core, but it was so far...
A sudden motion caught Gunai’s nervous eye, but it was just her daughter Teda. She had bumped Old John with her fields, sending his blocky form tumbling for a moment. “Teda!” Gunai scolded privately.
“But Mother, he’s so slow!”
“He’s doing the best he can. You should apologize.”
Teda turned to Old John, forming herself into a flattened oval of contrition, and said, “I’m sorry I bumped you.” Gunai was pleased that it seemed sincere, but he replied only with a curt gesture of acknowledgment.
Old John’s silence troubled Gunai. Apart from necessities, he had barely said anything since their meeting with the tribe of Yeoshi. This was unlike him. Usually he loved to share stories from his many years—though some derided them as mere legends—and Gunai was surprised he hadn’t picked up anything new at the gathering. Until now she had left him alone, thinking he might spring back by himself, but after Teda moved away she asked him privately what was bothering him.
“You know there was another of my... cohort, in the other tribe. One nearly as old as I. Shala was her name.”
“Yes, I know. I saw you with her.” It had been strange to see another with Old John’s stiff and blocky shape. She had thought he was unique. “Did she have any new stories for you?”
“She had new information. But not stories I would like to tell.”
“Go on.”
“She told me... she told me Earth’s sun is dying.” There was a sadness in his voice Gunai had never heard before. “Ballooning into a red giant. Much sooner than anyone had expected.”
“I’m sorry.” The words seemed so tiny.
“Given the velocities we use, I suppose I should have expected to outlive my birth planet. But still, the news hurt.”
“I thought Earth was gone already?”
“No. Dead, yes. Emptied, wasted, ruined, picked over. But still there. Massive with history. No other planet holds the stones where Shakespeare and Caesar walked. No other planet has that year, that gravity, that... that place in the sky.” His awkward form curled into a ball. “Soon even the headstone of Humanity will be gone.”
“It is a shame,” Gunai said, though many of his words meant nothing to her.
“My own bones are there,” the old man sobbed.
“What are bones?”
“Parts of me I threw away to become what I am today. Parts you never even had. They are buried with my parents.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“No,” he sighed, relaxing. “No, you wouldn’t. And you aren’t going to understand this either, but I want... no, I need to visit Earth again. To see it one more time before we both are gone.”
“You can’t be serious.” Gunai’s intuition told her where Earth was—over a thousand light-years away, in the very center of the deadest, most used-up area of the galaxy. “There’s nothing there.”
“I am serious. I will go by myself if I have to.”
Part of Gunai sneered that the tribe would be better off without the old man slowing them down. She beat that part down. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that. We need your wisdom.”
Old John’s body never showed emotion, but his voice now held a mixture of pleasure and regret. “Thank you. But... I feel I’ve taught you all I know already. Let an old man go to visit his dying homeworld. Please.”
“It would be different if you could have children to carry on your memories.” Old John looked away at that, and Gunai chided herself for raising the awkward issue. “I will consult with Enaji.”
Enaji was one of Gunai’s most trusted advisers. He was old—nearly half as old as Old John—but he had been born in space in the usual way, and upgraded his body and intuition regularly.
“Let him go,” he said. “Drain on the tribe.”
Gunai felt herself contracting in denial at his words. “How can you say that? Remember how he saved Rael and Kanna from the wolves? How he found a way out of the poison nebula? How his stories kept Jori alive?”
“Long time ago.” He furled his edges at her. “These are new times. Perilous. Universe is changing, and he is too old to change with it. Remember, I offered to share my intuition with him. He refused.”
“I can’t believe you could be so ungrateful.”
“Gunai... Don’t you see?” He stroked her with his fields, his tone softening. “His time is past. He knows it. Let him go. Let him keep his dignity.”
She turned away, presenting Enaji with a blind surface. “If I let him attempt that journey alone he would die. I could never live with myself.”
“Hard times call for hard decisions.”
The stars were tiny shards of light, scattered thinly on a dark background. Cold and heartless. They stared in at Gunai as she thought. How could she jeopardize her tribe for one old man’s insane whim? But how could she abandon the tribe’s eldest, wisest member—possibly the oldest human of all?
Gunai’s intuition told her there were trillions of humans, but space was so vast that even in her long life she’d encountered other tribes less than a hundred times. To leave a person alone, to cast them into the depths of time and space where they might never meet another human being again, was the greatest sin. Would a person who could convince herself to commit that sin be worthy of leadership? Would a tribe that could condone such a sin be worth leading?
No. She had lost Kula; she would not lose Old John.
“I will not abandon him,” she said to Enaji, “and I will not deny his request. We will all go to Earth.”
He pulled into a tight little ball. “We will regret this.”
“We may. But we would be less than human if we did not make the attempt.”
She sent out a call to the rest of the tribe. They gathered in a loose sphere with Gunai at the center.
She told them that Earth, ancestral home of humanity, was dying. She reminded them of Old John’s stories, which they all knew from their earliest days—fables of trees and mountains, castles and whales. She raised the spectre of isolation. She recalled the tragedy of Kula’s loss, and reminded them of regrets at things left undone until too late.
She called to their hearts.
There was debate. There was anger and acrimony. But in the end Gunai prevailed, for no one—not even Enaji—was cold-hearted enough to leave Old John to die of loneliness. Even if it meant risking their own lives.
The tribe scattered to forage. They would need all the energy they could muster for the journey.
Old John had been silent the whole time, sitting alone just outside the sphere of the meeting. Listening. After the last of the tribe had left, he came to Gunai.
“Thank you,” he said. The words were tiny, but they filled Gunai’s heart.
Some time later, the tribe gathered together to begin the journey. Rubbing and jostling, they pulled into a single mass—a teardrop shape with a hard, smooth outer surface. Intuition told them it was the best shape for this task. Then they channeled their energies together and pushed.
The motion was not immediately apparent, but they kept on, straining and huffing, pouring energy into acceleration. From time to time one or another member would relax for a moment, borne along by the others, then would resume the effort. But frail Old John never rested—he kept up a constant, steady thread of power.
As their velocity increased, they began to be peppered with particles of dust. Matter was thin here, but each particle stung, and they encountered more and more as they went faster. Soon they had to divert some of their energy to shielding the tribe from the impacts, and they all stared forward with eyes and intuition for larger masses that could do more than hurt.
The stars ahead appeared to brighten, their color changing from red to yellow and then to blue, and they seemed to smear out to the sides. As the eye swept to the side and back it could see a spectrum of colors, fading to red and finally to black behind them. The starbow.
“You told us about something called a ‘rainbow,’” Teda said to Old John. “Did it look like this?”
“Something like it,” he said, “but brighter, not so diffuse.” He paused, panting, for a moment, then said, “I think that the eyes I had then would not even be able to see the starbow. I wonder what a rainbow would look like to the eyes I have now?”
On and on they pushed, watching the universe flatten from a sphere into a ring of stars around them, fending off a rain of stinging impacts, feeling their motivators burn from unaccustomed effort and their bellies ache from hunger.
Finally they could push no more. They relaxed and coasted, though they still had to expend energy on shielding and course corrections. They coasted for a long time—fourteen years by their intuition, a thousand years or more by the stars. Most of them spent most of the time asleep, conserving energy. Gunai made sure there was always someone awake to maintain the shields and watch out for obstacles.
At last the time arrived to turn about. Guided by their intuition, they reformed themselves into a flaring saucer shape, catching the hail of dust they had been avoiding before. Even with shields, the dust burned their skins, but it helped them to slow. They began to push again, motivators aching. The universe expanded to a sphere, fading from a starbow back to a simple background of stars.
One star was much larger than the rest. They had come to a halt only a few hundred light-minutes away from it.
More than half the tribe had never been this close to a star before.
None but Old John had ever been so close to this particular star.
Sol.
The mother star looked sick. Its disk was turgid, yellow mottled with red, and its magnetic field roiled like their starving bellies. The wind of charged particles flowing from it battered the tribe as they separated from a traveling mass into a tribe of individuals. They took a little nourishment from the solar wind, but it was barely worth the effort. Old John said it was “like trying to drink from a hailstorm,” whatever that meant.
Gunai took on a streamlined shape, to resist the wind as best she could. She sent Enaji, Huss, and the rest of the best foragers out to look for zeren, and guided the rest of the tribe to the shadow of a nearby comet. Molecules of water and methane, burned from the comet by Sol’s angry heat, chilled their skins, but the comet’s rocky body shielded them from the wind.
After a time Enaji returned. “There’s nothing here,” he said, visibly shaken. “No zeren. Not a trace.”
“That’s impossible,” said Gunai. “Zeren forms from the energy of space itself. There’s always something.”
“The theory says zero-point energy cannot be consumed,” said Old John, “but there’s no denying it’s getting scarce. Apparently, around here, humanity managed to find a way to use it all up.” He went quiet for a moment. “This might explain why Sol is dying young.”
Gunai fought the urge to contract in fear. She needed to present a confident facade. “Perhaps one of the other foragers will find something.”
But as they came back, each had the same story: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Gunai’s heart tore as Huss, the last to return, came in sight. She was glad to see him safe, hopeful that he might have found forage, but after so much disappointment she was certain he would bring more of the same.
“Bad news,” Huss called. “Just one patch of zeren. Very thin.”
Gunai felt her edges flare in relief.
The tribe gathered together and left the comet’s tail, pushing into the battering solar wind. The stronger individuals shielded the weaker as much as they could, but all were pummeled. Gunai moved at the head of the tribe, taking the wind’s full force.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” said Enaji privately. “You should rest. Let me lead the tribe for a time.”
“No. I made the decision to come here. I should live with the consequences.” She tightened her leading edge and shoved herself forward, spreading wide to give Teda and Old John a little protection.
The chill wind rasped her skin. She gnawed on the pain, a bitter taste that deepened her martyred mood. How could she have been so foolish? She should have listened to Enaji before. She should listen to Enaji now. But to rest would spoil her self-punishment.
Finally a field of zeren appeared at the edges of perception. It was small, and thin, but it was here and it was what they needed. They spread over it eagerly, reveling in the zeren’s sweetness. Gunai was too tired to protest when Enaji channeled some of the energy he’d gathered to her; too tired to compliment Teda when she did the same for Old John.
They were all too tired, too hungry, to notice the wolves that circled the field.
They came knifing in from the dark of space, three hard black needles that cut through the tribe with inhuman screams. They lacked intelligence and intuition, but their natural abilities and instincts had been honed by eons of competition with the humans who had copied their bodies, and their hunger was sharp.
The first took Rael, piercing her through the center and carrying her away in one piece. Her cries were cut short before she was out of range. The second came at Gunai, but she dodged and lost only a few percent of her mass to the wolf’s raking fields.
The third hit Teda. Hit her hard, tearing away a huge part of her substance. She pinwheeled, screaming in agony, fields and mass spewing into the vacuum.
The shock of the impact ran through Gunai, hurting her more than the injury she herself had just suffered. She hurried to Teda’s side, shielding her from the wind with her body, soothing her with strokes and healing energies. Teda’s screams became whimpers, then began to fade.
“Here they come again!” cried Enaji.
Gunai whipped around to face the threat. Enaji and several of the others had firmed into needles, matching the wolves’ forms—hard to spot, hard to hit. Most of the rest were tightened into balls. “Make yourselves thin, like Enaji!” Gunai called to the tribe. “Enaji, Duna, Huss! Defend!” She moved out with the three she’d named, positioning herself between the tribe and the incoming wolves, making her skin as hard as she could. Prepared to sacrifice herself to save the others.
Thrashed by the wind, her attention focused on the wolves, Gunai did not see Old John moving up until he was already past.
“John!” Gunai screamed. “Get back behind me!”
Old John’s voice was determined as he accelerated away from Gunai, toward the wolves. “No,” he said. “You get back. This old body still has a few surprises in it.”
Then three bolts of energy sprang from Old John, three ragged lines of force that touched the wolves and tore them into pieces. Their death screams were briefer than Rael’s.
When Gunai and Enaji reached Old John, his awkward form was glowing red. “Stay back,” he called weakly. “I’m too hot to touch.”
“What was that?” said Gunai.
“Gravitic cannon. A weapon built for a war that was fought and lost a million years ago. Right here at Sol System.”
Enaji asked, “Why have you never done this thing before?”
“I have, but never where you could see.”
“Why?” cried Gunai.
“I didn’t want to burden you with the knowledge of what I am.”
Gunai was taken aback. “You are Old John. You are the oldest and wisest human I have ever met.”
“I am a weapon!” His body, now cooled almost to black, trembled. “I gave up my humanity a long time ago. I let myself be turned into a copy of those wolves we just met—but better, faster, more deadly.” He sighed. “For love of God and country.”
What were God and country? “You are as human as any of us.”
“You aren’t...” He bit off his words, started again. “You were born this way. You are full and valid individuals, on your own terms. But I cannot forget that I was something else before this. I maintain a familiar shape”—he gestured at his five-lobed form—“but sometimes I feel I am only a parody of what I used to be.”
Old John was now cool enough to approach. “Let us take you back to the tribe,” Enaji said. “You need food, and rest.”
“I am tired,” he acknowledged, and closed his eyes.
The rest of the tribe was badly shaken from their encounter with the wolves. They mourned Rael, and Teda was still leaking substance, despite Kanna’s ministrations. “She cannot heal properly without food,” Kanna said.
“Gather zeren,” said Gunai. “All you can find. She can have my share.”
“I have already given her your share, and mine, and everyone’s who could spare any. This field is too thin.”
“We must find another field, then.”
“Yes. But we don’t know how far that might be. She might die on the journey.”
“It’s all we can do.” She called to the tribe. Wearily the foragers prepared for another search.
Old John moved close to Gunai and whispered hoarsely. “There may be another way,” he said.
“Go on.”
“My intuition isn’t as good as yours, but its memory is unsurpassed. The war for which I was... built, it was a long and brutal one. We had caches of energy and supplies all over the Inner System. Some of them may still be there.”
“You said it was a million years ago!”
“We knew it would be a long war. Those caches were well-preserved, and well-defended. Only one who knows the old codes could open them.”
Gunai thought hard. It seemed a thin chance, but Old John’s wisdom had proven itself many times. The alternative was even thinner. “Very well. Take Enaji and Huss. Travel quickly and find one of these caches. I will follow with the rest of the tribe. Good luck.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Old John, Enaji, and Huss formed into a single needle and moved off, while Gunai explained the plan to the tribe. She had expected protests, but her explanation met only weary stares; the tribe was too tired, too demoralized. She was ashamed, knowing her poor decisions had led them to this point.
The tribe grouped into a streamlined shape, with unconscious Teda cradled in its center and Gunai at the leading edge. She stroked Teda with a field as they melded together.
Gunai’s motivators screamed in protest as she helped to accelerate the tribe into the oncoming wind. There was no starbow this time—they lacked the energy for those velocities. There was just a steady, slogging push, and the moans of exhausted tribe members.
The solar wind gusted and keened, battering them harder and harder as they came closer to the dying star. Old John’s signal was a steady, unmoving point ahead of them. The weary tribe passed a gas giant, its surface roiled and its ring system pushed off-center by the wind’s unnatural pressure. They entered a region scattered with chewed-up planetoids and worthless, abandoned hardware.
Finally they came in sight of Earth itself.
None of them had ever seen it before, but Old John’s many stories had taught them what it had been. A delicate ball of white and blue, he’d said, clad in the thinnest gossamer of atmosphere, the subtle breath of life.
No longer.
The atmosphere had been stripped away—by the war, by the wind, or by human action, there was no telling. What remained was a picked-over skull of a world, a gray mottled thing pocked with craters and circled by belts of detritus. Old John was in one of those belts, in synchronous orbit over the night side of the planet.
The tribe passed gratefully into the Earth’s shadow, relaxing as they left the pummeling solar wind. The dying star’s corona flared wildly as it fell behind the horizon.
They found Old John, Enaji, and Huss orbiting near a battered lump of aluminum and titanium. Old John’s relative position was steady; the other two flailed and fluttered, now falling back, now catching up. They had no experience with orbital mechanics this close to a primary.
Gunai came up to Old John, who steadied her with a field. Weary though she was, Gunai could see Old John was wearier still—tired as the ruined world below, from which his gaze did not stray. “I’m a million years old, Gunai,” he said. “I don’t think I ever really felt the... depth of that before.”
“Only as the planets measure time, John.”
“I think that’s the only way that really matters.”
They were silent for a time.
“I’m sorry,” Gunai said at last, “but Teda needs help. We will be passing into the solar wind again soon. What have you found?”
“It’s not a cache, I’m afraid. It’s a cascade bomb. But it’s still alive, and it responds to my codes. I think I can get it to give up its energies in a form we can use.”
“This is all you found?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“How much energy?”
“A lot. More than we’ve seen in one place in... generations.”
“That’s wonderful!”
But he did not seem pleased. At last he spoke again. “The bomb’s brain is very old, and not working well. I’m going to have to perform some of its functions myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m going to have to go inside the bomb. I have to be in there to release the energies.”
The ancient bomb was nothing but a shapeless lump of metal, cracked and dented. Yet it seemed to stare malevolently.
“You’ll die.”
“Probably.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“You have to. This is the only known source of usable energy for parsecs. Without it, the tribe will starve here. And Teda will die.”
“Let me do it. It was my decision to come here. The tribe needs your wisdom.”
“You can’t. The codes are keyed to my neurotype. And it was my foolish whim that brought us all here.”
The dying sun’s corona began to lick over the horizon. Its light made the stiff planes of Old John’s body seem to dance and flow like a modern person’s.
“You won’t be talked out of this,” said Gunai. It was not a question.
“No.”
She fought to keep her form steady. “What can I do to help?”
“Form the tribe into a hemisphere around the bomb. Maybe a tenth of a light-second in diameter. Spread yourselves out as thin as you can. Be prepared to let some of the energy through; if you try to catch it all, it may be more than you can take.”
“Very well.”
“And one more thing.” He stared at the dead planet for a long time. “Will you carry my child?”
Gunai was speechless. Finally she sputtered out, “It would be an honor. I thought you could not, or I would have asked long ago.”
“I can. But I never wanted to, because...” He paused, then began again. “I think of all of you as my children. With my tales, I have given you the good memories and kept the bad to myself. But a true child could receive any of my memories.”
“Don’t be ashamed of your memories. They are what make you what you are.”
“There are parts of what I am that I don’t like.” He glanced at the flaring corona. The star’s disk would be over the horizon soon. “No more time.” He pinched off a bit of himself, a packet of mass and memory, and Gunai took it into her body. “Go now. Remember what I told you.”
“I will remember everything.”
They entwined their fields briefly, then Gunai departed to instruct the tribe.
Soon the flaring sun, mottled and spotted, appeared over the horizon. Its wind followed immediately, battering the loose hemisphere the tribe had formed. The members were spread out to molecule thinness, barely visible except edge-on. The open side of the hemisphere was toward the wasted planet below.
There was a click in Gunai’s ears, then Old John’s voice came as though he were right next to her. “I’m connected to the bomb’s systems now. I can see everything. The whole system.” The battered old bomb began to turn, slowly. “I can even see inside of you. Fields and mechanisms. You are so beautiful... Of all humanity’s creations, you—our children—are the finest of all. We can be proud of you.” The bomb was spinning faster now, panels opening on its scarred surface. “Take good care of the universe.”
A rush of energy came from the bomb, reducing the light and wind from the old sun to insignificance. A colorless torrent of power, an overwhelming sweetness, rich and savory... a flavor Gunai had nearly forgotten. Zeren! Zeren as it once had flowed! But a thousandfold more powerful. Too powerful! She tried to drink it all in, absorb all the energy for the sake of the new life that stirred within her, but finally, sated to bursting, she had to let it go. Her whole body ruffled as the last of the energy passed through her.
The bomb spun, glowing white-hot but cooling rapidly. The tribe tumbled, overwhelmed, their hemispherical formation torn asunder by the bomb’s power, the solar wind, and their differing orbits. Their senses rang; their eyes were deafened and their motivators dumb.
Eventually they gathered together in the planet’s shadow. Several had tried to take in too much energy and had been burnt or torn. But they all surged with life. Vibrant and shimmering, they danced a pinwheel of sheer glee in the corona light. Even Teda danced, her mass reduced but the pain banished, the torn parts healed.
They gathered the carbonized remains of Old John’s body from the bomb housing, and placed them gently in an orbit that would intersect the planet’s surface. Gunai wept, but she wept from joy as well as sadness. Her tribe was strong and healthy, and John’s child flourished within her, bearing an unknown fraction of the old man’s memories.
Finally they drew together into an elegant shape, a majestic, streamlined thing out of one of Old John’s tales. With a mere fraction of their energies, they leapt into the starbow.
A whale swam the stars, heading for the untapped regions of the galactic core.