Heaven's Reach by David Brin; Jim Burns

Author:David Brin; Jim Burns
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780553574739
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1998-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

• • •

Robots continue tending the incubators, wherein juve-nile rings of many shapes, attributes, and colors thrive on distilled nutrients, growing into components to make new Jophur stacks.

Soldiers keep coming for repairs, seeking to replace damaged walker-rings, sword-manipulators, chem-synth toruses, and even mortally wounded Master Rings.

Clearly, the battle against the Zang rages on with deadly fury.

Meanwhile, on monitors, I/we watch Polkjhy emerge in some far star system, part of an orderly swarm of transcendence candidates—ranging from conventional-looking starships and spiky fractal shapes all the way to quivering blobs that appear horridly Zangish before our appalled gaze!

For several jaduras, this bizarre armada uses B-Level hyperspatial jumps 1.0 cross a gap of several paktaars, skirting around a vast glowing nebula in order to reach the next transfer point. Finally, the convoy dives into this nexus and another thread-ride commences, swooping along multidimensional flaw boundaries where space itself condensed long ago from the raw essence of an expanding universe.

While all this activity continues, we/I remain in a dim corner of the nursery chamber, hiding from our/My own crewmates . . . until the unexpected once again forces its way into our shock-numbed consciousness.

We stare at a new interloper.

A recent arrival, standing before our disbelieving senses. '

The strangest being that I/we/I have ever seen.

It came just moments ago, arriving via an unconventional route—by supply tube—conveyed to the nursery in a slender car designed for transporting raw materials and samples, not sapient beings!

Crawling out before we could react, it unfolded long limbs, revealing a shape with proportions like a Homo T

296 David Bfin

sapiens. Indeed, the head protruding atop looked completely human. And familiar.

I/we stared, did we not, my rings? Several of our cognition-memory toruses exclaimed, releasing recognition vapors and causing words to vent from our shared oration peak.

"Lark! Is ... it ... really . . . you?"

Indeed, the face cracked open with that unique human-style smile. When it/he spoke, the voice was as we knew him from olden days, on Jijo.

"Greetings, reverend Asx ... or shall I say Ewasx?"

While several of our components wrangled over an appropriate reply, others stared at the transformed body below the neckline. Lark's bipedal stance was similar, striding on stiff, articulated bones. Only now translucent film enveloped his flesh, ballooning outward like profoundly baggy garments, billowing and throbbing with a sick, semiliquid rhythm that sent quivers of nausea down our/My central core. An especially large bulge distended from his back, like a tumor, or a great burden he showed no sign of resenting.

Our chem-synth rings detected several awful stinks, such as methane, cyanogen, and hydrogen sulfide gas.

Sure stench-signs of Zang!

Surprise made our reply somewhat disjointed, to say the least.

"I/we . . . cannot say what . . . name . . . would best apply to this stack ... at this time. Voting commences/continues on that point. . . . And yet ... it can be said in truth that certain parts of us/Me/I/we recognize certain . . . parts ... of you/You. ..."

Our shared voice trailed off. Neither Anglic nor GalSix seemed well suited to convey appropriate/accurate levels of astonishment.

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