The bridge was small and cramped and eerily quiet with the tension of battle. Nothing but reptilians at the consoles, the cruiser’s captain at the center bigger than all the others, of course. They were all absorbing data directly through the cyborg jacks plugged into their temples, their eyes covered with wide-spectrum lenses that showed them everything that the ship’s sensors detected, far more than unaided eyes could see.
For me, though, there was nothing to see except these rapt reptilians at their duty stations, claws clicking on keyboards set into the armrests of their chairs. There were no screens for human eyes, nothing but blank metal bulkheads and consoles covered with dials and gauges that meant nothing to me. The bridge was uncomfortably hot, and had a strange dry charred smell to it, like a desert in a blazing noon sun.
Suddenly a hot glow blossomed off to one side of the bridge, burning through the bulkhead plates like a laser hit. I tried to call out a warning to the bridge crew but my voice would not work. The glow grew brighter, larger. I thought the ship’s shields had been broken through; in another instant the hull would be ripped open to vacuum.
None of the reptilians noticed a thing. Behind their lenses and cyborg jacks they remained intent on the battle. The glow turned golden, too bright to look at, yet I could not turn my eyes from it. Tears began to blur my vision as the glow dimmed slightly and resolved itself to the human form of Aten, the Golden One.
“Tears of joy, Orion, at seeing your creator once again?” he mocked.
He looked calmly magnificent in the midst of that terribly tense, inhumanly quiet bridge. He wore a splendid high-collared uniform of dazzling white, with gold piping and sunburst insignia on his chest. His thick mane of golden hair glowed magnificently; his cruelly handsome face was set in a cold smile.
“Or perhaps you feel frustrated at not being able to view the battle,” he said.
All at once I could see in my mind a planet nearby, and dozens of spacecraft swarming toward it. Defending craft were rising through its atmosphere, firing lasers and missiles as they approached our fleet. Three of their ships exploded soundlessly, vivid red blossoms of destruction against the planet’s blue ocean.
“The battle goes well,” the Golden One said.
The ship shook again from another blast, nearly knocking me off my feet.
“So I see,” I replied dryly.
Aten arched a golden brow. “Humor, Orion? Irony? My creature is expanding his repertoire of behaviors.”
“Where is Anya?” I asked.
His expression turned more thoughtful. “Far from here.”
“I want to see her.”
“Not now. You have an important task to accomplish.”
“This is the crisis that you spoke of, long ago?”
His smirk returned. “Long ago? Ah yes, you are still bound by a linear sense of time, aren’t you?”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“Impatient, too! Eager to see the goddess whom you love, I see.”
“Where is she?”
“Your duty to me comes first, Orion.”
“Who are these reptilians? Why are humans among them?”
“These lizards are our allies in the war, Orion. They are carrying your assault team in their ship.”
And my mind filled with new knowledge. I saw history unreeling like a speeded-up film. Saw the first struggling efforts of humans to reach into space. Saw the first of them to stand on the Moon, and then the long hiatus before they returned. Saw the expansion through the solar system: scientists exploring Mars, industrialists building factories in space, miners and political refugees and adventurers spreading through the asteroid belt and the moons of the giant planets.
And all the while, scientists searched for signs of intelligent life among the stars. Fossils were found on Mars, primitive plant life beneath the ice shields of Europa. But for a century and more our radio-telescope scans of the stars found nothing; our calls into the vastness of interstellar space went unanswered.
Within two centuries of those first faltering footsteps on the Moon, humankind achieved the stars. Boiling outward from the confines of the solar system, brash and eager with the discovery of energies that propelled ships faster than light, the human race finally met its equals among the stars, other species fully as intelligent as we. They were thinly scattered through the vastness of the galaxy, but they were there: intelligent life, some of it roughly humanoid in form, other species quite different. But there were civilizations for us to meet, to exchange thoughts with, alien creatures as mature and as intelligent as we.