Epilogue

In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but one of its best known musician- philosophers had just sung an importantdream-song.

It spoke of other worlds, of other forests among the stars, of other singers who one day might join the race in new and alien harmonies.

They were closer now to the realization of that dream-song than they could possibly have imagined.

Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palindromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. On this day, they recited a new palindrome, one announcing the revelation of a new messiah, latest in a long line of messiahs proclaiming the Vision of the Eye of God.

God’s message was that there were countless other beings living on alien worlds scattered across the vastness of the sky, that some of these beings Knew the glory of God, and many did not.

But there might one day soon be a means of taking God’s Vision to the stars.

Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating Type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the local stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the system as well. On one of those radiation-baked worlds, sentient crystalline chemovores had just discovered the principle of the solar sail, and had now within their grasp the ability to reach other nearby stars. The voyages would take centuries . . . but what was that to a species whose member beings lived for millennia?
The race, perhaps, would survive, even if their increasingly unstable sun did not.

1507.1102

Warhurst Residence, Seaview Gardens Lost Miami, Earth
1540 hrs, local

Garroway leaned back in the hot tub, savoring the blissfully scalding swirl of water across his shoulders. Nikki Armandez snuggled against his side, as naked as he was despite her Ishtaran upbringing. Opposite, Warhurst sat between the delightfully bobbing charms of Traci and Kath.

“Too bad Charel can’t be here with us,” Warhurst said. “You heard anything about him, Gare?”
“Only that he’s doing well. The regrow’s just taking longer with him. He was burned a lot worse than either of us.”
“But he’ll be okay?”
“Doc O’Neill said so.” Garroway shrugged. “That’s good enough for me.”
All fourteen of the surviving Marines stranded for so long at the Galactic Core had made it, though it had been desperately close for a few of them. Seven, including Ramsey, were still in the Marine hospital in EarthRing. Garroway had been released only two days earlier. Much of his body had been either regrown from scratch or replaced by exotic nano-chelated materials. It was sobering to realize that less than a third of his total body now was organic in the traditional sense.

But he was alive. Alive. He could even still have sex, as he’d enthusiastically proved several times now both with Nikki, and in one memorable five-way last night that had included Kath and Traci. He would never have children of his own, not in the traditional way, at least.

It didn’t matter to him in the least. Aiden Garroway had all the family he needed. He’d checked out on a two-week leave and come down-ring with Nikki to Miami. Warhurst had checked out of the hospital almost a week earlier, and was spending it back home with his partners.

“So!” Traci said brightly. “Have either of you boys seen the latest from the encyclopedia? It just came through this morning!”
“Hell, no,” Warhurst said. “You three kept me up all night, remember? I’ve been getting my hard-earned beauty sleep.”
“Which you definitely need,” Garroway told him. “No, Traci. What came through now?”
“Have a look!”
With a thought, a large display rose from the deck behind the tub and switched on. She could have given him a direct link, of course, but apparently she wanted to see his reaction as he watched with his eyes instead of his mind.

“My God,” Garroway said, looking at the image on the screen. “What is it?”
“According to the Translators, it’s a living rock. A kind of complex crystalline solid that processes stellar energy on some planets around an A-class star maybe twenty thousand light years from here. The planet’s surface is so bathed in radiation that—”
“Ah . . . I don’t think I want to hear about that,” Garroway said, holding up a dripping hand. “I’ve had enough radiation baths to last me, thank you very much.”
“How many alien species does that make now?” Warhurst wanted to know.

“Two hundred seventy-three . . . and according to the Translators, more are turning up every day. Looks like the Galaxy’s a pretty crowded place after all.”
It had been an astonishing end to an astonishing adventure, Garroway thought. When S-2 had crashed through the Dyson cloud surrounding the central black hole, many of those trillions of structures had been vaporized outright in the heat of the exploding sun. Others, their magnetic support structure fatally damaged, had collapsed into the relentless pull of the black hole.

The Xul, the ancient Hunters of the Dawn, still survived, of course. There were, N-2 estimated, some tens of thousands of Xul nodes still scattered across the Galaxy. But the vast majority of their total numbers had perished in the cataclysm at the Galactic Core. There was some question as to whether the survivors could even function now, given the possibility that they’d needed a critical mass in terms of numbers in order to act.

Whatever had happened to the Xul, one startling change had manifested almost as soon as the Dyson cloud was swept away from the region encircling GalCenter. Someone, some thing, was using the Galaxy’s black hole as a colossal communications and information storage device. The Xul cloud had been blocking the signals from that device. With the Xul gone from the Core, now, the signals had resumed.

Black holes, large and small, were doorways of sorts into the Quantum Sea, the base state of reality. Technically, nothing could escape a black hole, a gravitational singularity that held captive everything that passed its event horizon, even light.

And yet, it seemed now, black holes could communicate with one another, instantly, via the Quantum Sea. Fluctuations of their event horizons as matter fell through them created gravitational distortions that served as carrier waves. Modulations impressed upon those distortions carried information. A lot of information.

The nature of those waves had been detected by the MIEF hours after the collapse of the Dyson cloud; nested signals, layer upon layer of them, were captured, recorded, and routed through powerful artificial intelligences programmed as translators. The surface data in those layers, it turned out, were mathematical formulae designed as a linguistic and technical primer, allowing for a relatively simple translation of the deeper layers of data.

In a month, the Translators had barely begun their work. Still, public fascination with the news had forced the government to release some data as it became available. Every so often, a description of a new and utterly alien race was gleaned from the ocean of electronic data, condensed into an entertaining format, and broadcast over the GlobalNet.

Centuries before, radio astronomers had speculated on the possibility of a Galaxy-wide network of stored information bearing data on myriad worlds and civilizations. They’d called it the Encyclopedia Galactica, and assumed it would be presented as information encoded into radio signals broadcast from star to star. The fact that in years of painstaking searching they’d never found such a thing had been part of the enduring mystery of the Fermi Paradox. Where was everyone?
And now the Encyclopedia Galactica had been found . . . its signals masked by the Xul cloud at the Galactic Core. No one yet knew whether the Xul had been reading those imbedded messages, or were so intent on their tinkering with Reality that they’d not even seen them. Another mystery. Another Unknown.

The primary broadcast center was the Galactic Core, but it turned out that every black hole was linked into the Network. While the central black hole was off-line, as it were, no signals had come through any of them. Now, though . . .

There were hints that the Network was more than Galactic in scale, hints that galactic black holes across the entire universe might be talking with one another . . . and in real time, not the crawl of eons endured by slow-paced light.

“Well, it’s good to know the Xul didn’t wipe out everyone in the Galaxy,” Garroway said. “It was starting to feel a bit lonely, you know?”
Not as lonely, perhaps, as the surface of S-2/I. But every indicator suggested that the Galaxy should be humming with life, while Humankind’s explorations so far had uncovered so few—the An, the N’mah, the Eulers.

And the Xul.

Within the titanic elliptical galaxy called M-87, located in what Earth astronomers described as the Virgo Cluster some sixty million light years from Sol, Mind considered the new data. For some millions of years, a partic ular modest spiral galaxy within the outlying reaches of the Virgo supercluster had been unaccountably silent, the singularity within its central core somehow shrouded and muffled, blocking Mind.

And now, the shroud had been lifted.

Mind considered the implications. Presumably, the inhabitants of that galaxy had chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the cosmos. It happened sometimes, for religious or philosophical or emotional reasons. There were so many, many different types of mind, so many forms of thought.

The collective sentience that called itself Mind had not interfered, of course, but it was curious.

And it wondered now at just what had changed in that insignificant spiral, sixty million light years distant. . . .

Perhaps further investigation would be necessary.

Much later, Garroway awoke, cuddled between Nikki and Traci, while Warhurst and Kath snored gently nearby. The overhead had been set to show the star-clotted night sky. After the Galactic Core, the sky seemed dark and empty with its scant handful of bright stars, its almost non existent dusting of dimmer ones. The Milky Way stretched across the zenith.

I wonder if we really made a difference?
Sagittarius. In that direction, he thought, lay the Core. Energy shredded from the dying sun S-2 and from the infalling trillions of Xul habitats had been blasted outward in an explosion that would likely continue for millennia. Most of the debris had been swallowed by the central black hole, but much, too, had escaped. In a few centuries, the outrushing blast would intercept those molecular gas clouds ringing the center, and the shock wave would trigger a burst of star formation that in twenty- some thousand years would turn the Galactic center brilliant, even out here in the stellar suburbs.

Oh, yeah. The Marines had made a difference. No one knew, yet, if the Xul War was over. Probably it wasn’t . . . but the balance of things had most certainly changed.

Things would be different. Changed. Perhaps in ways now unguessable.

As he drifted back into sleep, Aiden Garroway thought about the Marine Corps, and the difference the Corps had always made in the vaster scheme of things.

Semper fi . . . .