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"So soon, Cassiopeia?" Malenfant said, his voice unsteady.

I AM SORRY, MALENFANT.

Malenfant straightened up, withdrew his arm from Madeleine's shoulders. She felt the reluctance in the gesture. She'd provided him comfort after all, she realized; by caring for her, he had been able to put off confronting the reality of it all. But now, in the silent person of the Gaijin, the reality was here, and he had to face it alone.

But here was old Esau, grinning from one side to the other of his flat face, deep eyes full of starlight. He was signing: the fistto the forehead, then left palm flat upright, supporting the right fist, which was making a thumb's-up gesture.
Hey, Stupid. I'll help you.

Malenfant signed back.
What help me what what?

Forefinger and middle finger together, on both hands, held out like a knife; a sharp chop downward, a stark, unmistakable sign.
To die.

Cassiopeia embraced him.

He was pulled into her body, articulating arms folding about him. He could smell the burning tang of metal that had been exposed to vacuum, to the light of a hundred different Suns. And now finer arms, no more than tendrils, began to probe at his body, his skin, his mouth, his eyes.

Through a mist of metal cilia, he could see Madeleine on the hillside before him, weeping openly. "Tell them about me, Madeleine. Don't let them forget."

"I will. I promise."

Now warm metal probed at his ears, the membranes of his mouth, even his eyes. Probed and pierced, a dozen stabs of sharp pain. Then came an insidious penetration, and he could taste blood. "It hurts, Madeleine." He cried out; he couldn't help it. "Oh, God!"

But now Esau was before him, signing vigorously.
Stupid Stupid. Watch me me.

Malenfant tried to focus as the pain deepened.

Esau sat on the hillside. By the light of Galaxy-center stars, he held out a core of obsidian.

Malenfant reached forward. His bare arms trailed long shining tendrils, back to the cold body of the Gaijin, within which he was merging. He could move his fingers, he found. But they glinted, metallic.

Esau was still holding out the glassy rock, thrusting it at him.

Malenfant took the rock. He could feel its rough texture, but remotely, as if through a layer of plastic. He turned it over in his hands.

Esau held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He signed bluntly to Malenfant.
Same as me, Stupid. Do same as me. Copy.

Obediently, Malenfant set to work, tapping clumsily at the rock, emulating Esau's movements, practicing this most ancient of human crafts twenty-five thousand light-years from home.

"The Buddhists have a doctrine of
anatta,"
Madeleine murmured. "It means,
no self.
Or rather, the self is only temporary, like an idea or a story. 'Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not'... It won't be so bad, Malenfant. Some people can do this for themselves. Some
choose
it..."

She was weeping, he saw, the tears leaking out of closed eyes. Weeping for him. But he must not think about her. He tried to bury himself in the tasks. He focused on the work, the movements of his hands and arms. He would think about Madeleine -- and put the thought aside. The differences between his own hands and the Neandertal's struck him, frustrating him with his own clumsiness. But he must put aside that thought too.

For brief periods, he got it. It was as if he saw the stone, the tool he was making, with a kind of stunning clarity:
the thing itself,
not the geologic processes that had produced the raw material, not the mysterious interstellar gateways that had brought him and the stone to this place, not even the tool's ultimate purpose. Just the thing, and the act.

But then the spell would be broken, and plans and analyses and self-consciousness would return to clutter up his head, an awareness of Madeleine and Cassiopeia, and Esau, the trees and grass and the heart of the Galaxy, and the
pain,
that penetrated right to his core.

"You have to let it go, Malenfant," Madeleine whispered. "Don't think. Live in the now, the present moment. If ideas come up, reflections, memories, hopes, fears, let them go. Butterflies, flitting out the window. Treat everything equally. Don't filter, don't focus. Watch Esau..."

Esau, yes.

Malenfant was like an observer. But Esau
was
the rock he worked in its deep chthonic richness, in a way Malenfant perhaps could never be. It was a smooth, rolling, fleeting form of awareness, without past or future, memory or anticipation. It was like driving a car while holding a conversation. Like being stoned. Or like being five years old, and every moment a delicious Saturday morning.

Madeleine was still talking, but he could make out no words. She was receding, as if dissolving.

Good-bye, good-bye.

He closed his eyes.

...No, it wasn't like that:

There was a blue flash, a moment of searing pain.

"Emma!"
he cried.

And then--

Limbs that worked. Tactile, graceful. Tasks that were progressed.

The rope: complex, multilevel, a thing of monomolecular filaments, superconducting threads within. The extension of the rope, the repair of breaks, the tasks of the limbs.

Visual receptors, eyes. A repositioning.

Data nets above, below, all around, a great curving wall. At extremes, a flat-infinite plane, in every direction: the sail.

Above, the spitting neutron star, its envelope of gas.

Here, a body, a spiderlike form of many limbs, a dodecahedral box at the center. Multiple tasks for those limbs. The sail that was repaired, extended; the body that was maintained, adjusted, itself extended; records that were kept; a mesh of communications with others that was maintained, extended.

Other workers.

Some near. Some far. Some as this body, a common design. Millions of them. Some not. Tasks that were progressed.

The structure. Vibrations, the shudder of torn threads. Complex modes, wave forms in space and time.

War, in a remote part of the sail.

A position that was adjusted, an anchoring of the body that was improved and secured.

The work that was progressed in one part of the sail, war in other parts.

The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

The universe, of tasks, of things.

No center.

...And he felt as if he were drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, toward the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream -- but he had no mouth, and no
words.
What would he scream?

I am.

I am Malenfant...

No.
Not just Malenfant. Malenfant / Esau / Cassiopeia.

The pain!

The shuddering of the net. The anchoring. The work that was progressed...

No! More than that.
I
feel the shudder.
I
must hold on to the net;
I
must continue the work, in the hope that sanity will prevail, the conflict is resolved, the work is continued, the greater goal achieved.

Thus it must be. Oh, God, the
pain.

Terror flooded over him. And love. And anger.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place. And within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

Beautiful. Scary.

And he saw it with eyes beyond the human.

He saw the sleeting rays that flowed beyond the human spectrum: the sail's dazzle of ultraviolet, the sullen infrared glower of the star itself. He saw the sail, its curves, the star, from a dozen angles, as if the whole impossible, unlikely structure was a mote that swam within his own Godlike eyeball, visible from all sides
at once,
as if it had been flayed and pinned to a board before him.

And he saw the whole project embedded in time, the sail unfurling, growing, the star's slow, reluctant deflection. He saw its origins -- the sail shared design features with the artifact that had been found cupping a black hole in the system of the species called Chaera; perhaps it too was a relic of those vanished builders.

And he even saw it all through the gauzy eyes of mathematics. He could see the brutal equations of gravity and electromagnetism that governed the drag of the star's remote companion, the push of star on sail and sail on star; and he could see, like shining curves extending ahead of and back from this single moment, how those equations would unfold, the evolution of the system through time, out of the past, through the now, and into the future.

Not enough,
he saw.

Still the construction of the sail was outpaced by the neutron stars' approach. The project was projected to fail; the stars were mathematically destined to collide before the sail's deflection was done, the great gamma-ray burst lethally mocking their efforts. But they must, they would, try harder, the toiling communities here.

...And if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are
you?
God knows you're no mathematician.

He looked down at himself.

Tried to.

His gaze swiveled, yes, his vision sparkling with superhuman spectra. But his
head
did not turn.

For he had no head.

A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail's gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the center of the Galaxy.

A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind. What was he truly? A partial personality, downloaded into a clumsy robot, clinging to this monstrous structure, bathed by the lethal radiation of a neutron star?

And even now the robot he rode was working, knitting away at the net. This body was working, without having to be told, directed, by
me,
or anybody else.

But that's the way it is, Malenfant. Self is an illusion, remember. You've always been a passenger, riding inside that bony cage of a skull of yours. It's just that now it's a little more... explicit.

Welcome to reality.

But if I'm a robot, why the
pain?

He looked for Cassiopeia, for any of the Gaijin, reassuring dodecahedral bulks. He saw none, though the unwelcome enhancements of his vision let him zoom and peer through the spaces all around him.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy simulated plain... Hadn't it?

How do you
know,
Malenfant? How do you know you haven't been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And how do you know this isn't the first time you surfaced like this?

How
could
he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What
was
his memory? What if he was simply
restarted
each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he
know?

In renewed terror, lost in space and time -- in helpless, desolating loneliness -- he tried again to scream. But he could not, of course.

The sail shuddered. Great ripples of disturbance, thousands of kilometers long, wafted through the net. As the waves passed, he saw others shaken loose, equipment hurled free, damaged.

Without his conscious control, he was aware how his body -- or bodies? How do you know you're
even in one place,
Malenfant? -- grasped tighter to the fine structure.

He felt a clustering of awareness around him. Other workers here, perhaps. Other parts of himself.

Frightened.

Have faith, he told his companions, his other parts. Or his disciples.

But that was the problem.
They
didn't have faith. Faith was a dangerous idea. The only thing less dangerous, in fact, was the universe itself, this terrible rebooting accident of celestial mechanics.

All this had happened before: the wars, the destruction, the abandonment of work, the resumption, the patient repairs.

There was a species he thought of as the Fire-eaters. They were related to the Crackers, who had tried to disrupt Earth's Sun. But these more ambitious cousins wanted to steal part of the sail and wrap up a hypernova, one of the largest exploding stars in the Galaxy. As best he understood it they would try to capture a fraction of that astonishing energy in order to hurl themselves out of the Galaxy within an ace of light speed. And that way, their subjective experience stretched to near immobility by time dilation, they would outlive this reboot, and the one after it, and the one after that. He remembered a diversion of resources, a great war, huge damage to the sail, before the Fire-eaters were driven off.

...He
remembered.

Yes.
He had surfaced, like this, become Malenfant before, cowering under a sky full of silent, deadly, warring ETs, in a corner of the sail where the threads buckled and broke.

Surfaced more than once.

Many times.

How long have I been here? And between these intervals of half-remembered awareness, how long have I toiled here, awake but unaware?

Ah, yes, but take a look at where you
are,
Malenfant.

He looked up from the rippling sail, away from the lethal neutron star, and into the complex sky.

He was at the heart of the Galaxy, within the great central cluster of stars, no more than a couple of dozen light-years from the very center. At that center there was a cavity some twenty light-years wide, encased by a great shell of crowded, disrupted stars; the neutron star binary huddled at the inner boundary of this shell.