Occasionally life form met life form. Interspecies conflict was rare because the needs and desires of alien races differed too greatly. Within species, however, rapid expansion gave opportunities for terrible wars and sometimes extinction when the extremities rebounded against themselves and the center.
Humanity avoided final oblivion, but by no more than a razor’s edge. The thousand-year Hiatus from star travel could easily have become the eternal eclipse of the human race.
The Tree knew all things, but it cared about nothing.
Human fleets sailed between stars, threading in and out through the bubbles of the Matrix but returning to the sidereal universe except when catastrophe overtook them. The man named Daniel Leary had a feel for the Matrix, its currents and its pressures; but the Tree was the Matrix and all other existence, then and now and tomorrow.
On the planet men called New Delphi humans searched and struggled, their minds seething with anger and despair. The man named Daniel Leary felt their pain and would have washed it away had he been able to; but Daniel Leary no longer existed save as an idea in the Tree’s awareness, the equivalent of the warmth of sun on leaves or the wind’s eternal pressure on the multi-stemmed trunk.
A human asked a question; and the Tree knew. . . .
* * *
Adele awoke, momentarily angry that she’d been asleep. She jerked upright, rousing the spacers guarding her to full alertness. The watch had changed while she slept, but Hilbride slept curled on the floor at her feet.
The high-intensity lights in the stacks switched themselves on when a human being walked near, but they were all off now. Adele had been slumped over the console she was using, blurring the screen because her head lay over some of the holographic projectors.
Grimacing at her own weakness, she looked around. Tovera nodded with the slight smile she generally wore; the expression had as little humor in it as the similar curve of a cobra’s lipless mouth. “Good morning, mistress,” she said. “It’s oh-six-fourteen by the ship’s time.”
“Have you gotten any sleep?” Adele said.
Tovera shrugged, her smile minusculely broader. “Enough,” she replied; which didn’t answer the question Adele asked but was responsive nonetheless. “I can function.”
Tovera could function in any condition short of death, Adele presumed; and whatever killed her, as something doubtless would one day, had better not count her out for the sixty seconds or so a human brain retained enough oxygen to function.
Adele stood, noting the enormous clutter of books blocking access to several of the nearer consoles. An acolyte—the same man she’d noticed before—sat at the far end of the rank; he felt her eyes on him and turned to nod, then resumed his work.
Good God but she’d made a mess! And she wasn’t any closer to finding Daniel than she’d been at the beginning of the night. Well, she wasn’t dead yet, either.
Woetjans rose; she’d been sitting on a stack of books down the aisle. Adele winced when she saw the bosun’s choice of a seat, but she didn’t comment.
“Mistress,” Woetjans said with a nod. The big woman looked a decade older than she had when the Princess Cecile landed. “I’ve been wondering what we do if, you know, he doesn’t turn up.”
The guards watched Adele in intent silence. Hilbride had awakened; he was poised to get up from the floor, but he didn’t move while he waited for her answer.
“You go on, bosun,” Adele said crisply. “As your duty requires. As you know.”
But that didn’t answer what Signals Officer Mundy would do. Adele wasn’t sure of that answer herself. It was unlikely that her presence on New Delphi over the next years or decades would locate Daniel; but perhaps it would make a difference . . . and perhaps that was the decision she’d make.
For now, though, there were more volumes to examine, at least a thousand of them. She looked at the jumble of books she’d been through—carefully enough? Had a crucial paragraph escaped in her haste and fatigue?—and thought of the many-times greater task still ahead. She sighed, stretched, and prepared to return to it.