Facing him, Venator lay likewise; but although the huntsman’s eyes were open, they seemed blind and his visage had become a mask. What now did he see, what knowledge was his?
The presence of the Teramind, Kenmuir thought, the nearness of the great core engine, save that the Teramind was no single machine or being. It was the apex of the cybercosm, the guiding culmination, as the human brain was of the human organism. No, not really that, either. All machines in a way stemmed from it, like men and gods from Brahm, and the souls of its synnoionts yearned home toward it.
But here was no static finality, Kenmuir knew. This was not what artificial intelligences, set to creating a superior artificial intelligence, had wrought; it was the cybercosm as a whole, evolving. Already its thoughts went beyond human imagination. How far beyond itsown present imagination would they range in another hundred or another billion years?
Venator’s lips parted. “lan Kenmuir,” he said gravely. Did the Teramind speak through him, as through an oracle?
“I am ready,” Kenmuir responded. He had no honorific to add; any would have been a mockery.
“You understand you are neither sophotect nor synnoiont You are outside. Therefore I shall be what link between us there may be.”
Otherwise, could the presence give Kenmuir more than discourse, displays, a shadow show? By Venator, whose flesh was human, he might be made able to comprehend, to feel, what the unhuman alone could never quite convey.
“Ask what you will,” said the voice.
“You know what has brought us to this,” replied Kenmuir as quietly. “Why have you kept Proserpina hidden away?”
“The answer is many-sided.”
And will it be true? wondered a rebellious mote.
“You shall judge its truth for yourself,” said the voice.
Self-evident truth, at the end of a road of reasoning? But could he follow that road, up and up to its end? “I listen. I watch.”
Something like an expression fleeted over Venator’s countenance and through his tone. A pain, a longing? “We share a memory, you and I.”
Luminous amidst the dark, the image of Lilisaire, so alive that even then Kenmuir caught his breath. The gown rustled and rippled about her slenderness. Felinely, she turned to look at him. Dark-red and flame-red, her hair fell over the white shoulders, past the fine blue vein in her throat. She smiled at him with the big, oblique, changeably gold and green eyes and with the lips he remembered. Did she purr, did she call?
More images came, flickered, and fled. It was not a document, not a sequence or montage, it was a stream of dreams to awaken him. Beneath his tranquility, it hurt. He had not wished to count up her lovers, her betrayals, the men she killed and the men she had had killed, the men she wedded and enwebbed, the men she broke to her will or lured down ways whereon they lost themselves, the willfulness now glacial and now ablaze but always without reckoning or ruth, the fact that she was feral.
“Beautiful, boundlessly ambitious, infinitely dangerous,” murmured the voice.
“No,” Kenmuir denied. “Can’t be. One mortal woman—”
“One whom circumstance has made the embodiment of her blood.”
Images out of history. Lunarian arrogance, intransigence, outright lawlessness, in the teeth of unforgiving space Intrigues, murders, terrible threats. The Selen-archy sovereign, holding its nation apart from the unity of humankind. Rinndalir’s scheme to wreck the whole order of things, for the sake of wrecking it. Niolente’s fomenting of revolt on Earth and war on the Moon, her death like a cornered animal’s, and in the ruins a secret that her bloodline had kept through centuries. Lilisaire, again Lilisaire.
“No!” Kenmuir shouted, the calm within him shaken asunder. “I won’t condemn an entire race!” He swallowed. “I can’t believe you would.”
“Never. Do we curse the lightning or the tiger? They too belong with life.”
Next the dream was of a world. A thunderbolt fixed nitrogen that nourished a forest. Under the leaves, a carnivore took his prey and thereby kept a herd healthy, its numbers no more than the land could well feed. The sea that drowned some ships upbore all others, and in its depths swam whales and over their heads beat wings. Dead bodies moldered, to be reborn as grass and flowers. Snow fell, to melt beneath springtime and water it.